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Mr Brown, do you accept that another potential criterion for the success of a pilot might be the experience of complainers? One of the issues that the committee has been very concerned about over a long time is the experience of complainers. Rape victims repeatedly say that they find it retraumatising to go through not just the process of the actual trial but the whole justice system. Do you accept that it is possible that taking the jury out of the process might impact on complainers’ experiences, and that that might be a criterion that we should consider?

I understand that often the issue in a rape trial is consent.

—which means that if the jury believes the evidence, there should be a conviction. That is what you would expect if the evidence is accepted by the court. Is that correct?

So, yes—if the Crown evidence is accepted, there should be a conviction. We understand that many judges believe that they have been involved in sexual offences cases in which there could have been a conviction and it would have been justified, but the jury acquitted. Is it possible that we might get different outcomes if such cases were heard by a single judge? Given that this is a pilot—it is not changing the whole system; it is simply a pilot—do you think that that is worth looking at?

Is it your view that, if juries heard summary cases, conviction levels would be similar to those that exist at the moment?

Is it generally the case that jury trials tend to lead to more acquittals than non-jury cases?

I think that we understand that. However, we know that, in Scotland, the way that the Crown marks cases is based on sufficiency of evidence—

You seem to be saying that it often comes down to who is believed in court.

You referred to a conviction rate of 42 per cent. I appreciate that there are different ways of looking at that, but I will take that as the figure. We know that the figure is slightly, but not massively, higher in England, and that the conviction rate for rape is significantly lower than the rate for many other types of offence. I appreciate that many other cases will be summary cases, which will not involve juries, and that those are different, but you specifically made a parallel with other serious crimes, which is not an argument that I have heard being put to the committee before.

Will you elaborate on that? If you are saying that we are making the wrong comparison because we are comparing the conviction rate in rape cases with other forms of crime, what types of crime would make a fairer comparison? Would it be, for example, complex fraud or murder? What direction would you point us in, to look at those kinds of conviction levels?

Let us exclude them, then. What kind of cases do you think we should be comparing them with?