I was told that, in effect, this was the luck of the draw, but it didn’t seem right to me.NICK WILLMOT Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire Blair fights for his injured innocence Sir: Every miscreant schoolboy knows that when you get found out, the two best tactics are “injured innocence” – outraged denial of something you haven’t been accused of – and “stonewall” – flat rejection (preferably with oodles of sincerity, good eye contact and smiling) of the real offence.Mr Blair could not know whether there were or were not chemical weapons in Iraq before the war, so whether he asserted or denied their presence, neither statement could have been a lie. It’s often not until the case has begun to unfold that the important issues emerge, and in trying to write down all the details there’s a danger of missing the really important bits: I think it’s better to watch and listen.My main concern was that over the course of two weeks in a big Midlands city I encountered well over 70 jurors, only one of whom was Black or Asian. Classism, racism and sexism may then replace the lesser deficiencies that real and representative people unavoidably occasionally display.Professor FRANCES STEWART Director, Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity University of OxfordSir: Having also served on a jury recently, I am not at all sure that a large helping of doctors, dentists or architects makes for an effective panel, and often an academic, analytical approach to a case is just what you don’t want; in the face of a welter of claims and counter-claims, common sense is often a better approach.Nor do I think it’s necessarily helpful to take notes. If it is replaced by trial by judges it will inevitably mean that middle class, mostly white, mostly male people stand in judgement on the accused, many of whom have none of these characteristics.

The juries I was on broadly reflected life in Britain today – in terms of class, race, ethnicity and gender. Attention to detail, rigorous argument and spotting flaws and inconsistencies in the evidence came from jurors of every class.The jury system represents trial by one’s peers. I came away enormously impressed by the jury system – by the good sense, seriousness and integrity of the jurors.My fellow jurors came from all walks of life, including the middle classes who were so poorly represented in Lewin’s jury life. The jury is our defence against class-biased justice

The jury is our defence against class-biased justice
Sir: Like Matthew Lewin (Opinion, 4 February ), I too have recently been a juror But my experience was radically different. The inaudible component was the absence of any mention of the fact that the night before John Lydon had described the great viewing public as a couple of four-letter words on I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. That once unconscionable howl of contempt, banned from all radio airplay, had been reconfigured as a mildly regretful kind of folk song – and it took to the treatment astonishingly well.

Someone was reporting on a new surge in interest in the ukelele – and to demonstrate that the instrument had finally broken away from Hawaiian serenades and comic song they played a ukelele version of “Anarchy in the UK”. For historians of punk and its aftermath there was a culturally significant edition of the Today programme on Wednesday morning. The significance consisted partly of something you could hear and partly of something you couldn’t. The audible component turned up in one of the softer reports with which Today’s editors leaven its diet of political contradiction and public policy.

Otherwise, when I get to 75 and am frail, pass me a carrier bag, and I shall put it over my head myself
More from Janet Street-Porter. Let’s pay Delia Smith and Prue Leith to focus on exciting catering, let’s get Robert Winston and Miriam Stoppard to consider rebranding the career structure for carers, and let’s get Des Lynam and Seb Coe to insist that every care home has its own gym with qualified instructors.Let’s requisition department stores like Peter Jones, have little caf?and mini shops on the ground floor where we crumblies can sell newspapers, snacks and our cast-offs to passers-by, and a helicopter pad on the roof to whisk us off to the opera or a concert.We owe it to ourselves to start working on this now. Mr Blair ought perhaps to stop focusing on weapons of mass destruction and their mysterious whereabouts, and start to consider the domestic time-bomb which is facing him over the next seven years, when one in five of the entire population will be pensioners with nowhere to live if they need care, no one to look after them and a National Health Service that will not be able to cope.Urgent action should be happening right now – iconic baby boomers like Mr Terence Conran and Mr Paul Smith should be given massive tax breaks to come up with inner-city buildings that can be converted into the kind of old people’s homes they might want to spend the night in. The staff are often poorly trained and would earn more stacking the shelves of their nearest Asda. You don’t want too much information.The National Care Standards Commission has been scrapped and merged into the new Commission for Social Care Inspection from this April, but I don’t expect the cosy culture of inspectors ringing in advance of their visit to change much And carers as an industry are always on the defensive. But there are dozens of cases of neglect and abuse which go unrecorded every single day.