Mistrial of a Time Lord

By Danny Nicol,

Professor of Public Law
University of Westminster.

“The Trial of a Time Lord” (1986) was a 14-part serial, the longest in Doctor Who’s history.   In it, the Doctor (Colin Baker) is put on trial by his own people, the Time Lords, for interfering in the affairs of other peoples and planets.   The trial is presided over by the Inquisitor (Lynda Bellingham) and the Doctor is prosecuted by an official called as the Valeyard (Michael Jayston).   

Doc in the dock: the Doctor makes a
point in his defence

The trial provides the opportunity to relate several of the Doctor’s adventures which the Valeyard deploys as evidence of his guilt.  Professor James Chapman has criticised these various segments as unengaging, and has condemned the over-arching narrative as inconsistent, incoherent and poorly-structured (Inside the Tardis: The Worlds of Doctor Who, 2^nd edition, London: Tauris, 2013, pp.158-9).  Be that as it may, this post focuses not on the merits or demerits of the serial, but on the procedural shortcomings of the trial.   

The analysis does not purport to be comprehensive.  Indeed the procedural deficiencies in “The Trial of a Time Lord” are so substantial as to merit a major article in the field of Law and Television.  Instead this post merely flags up a few of the issues of procedure with which the narrative engages (and does so without giving the game away about the plot’s moment of revelation). 

A first issue in the trial is what lawyers call public interest immunity.  This is the notion that certain information can be withheld from the court in the public interest.  When the Doctor is on the planet Ravalox certain dialogue incriminating the Time Lords is removed from the evidence.  In 1968 in Conway v Rimmer ([1968] AC 910) Britain’s top court the House of Lords held that it was for the court - not the government - to strike a balance between two public interests involved: the public interest in withholding the information versus the public interest in ensuring justice in the case.  Here, the Inquisitor shows undue deference to the Time Lords’ decision on suppressing the information: she does not really interrogate the public interest in non-disclosure.

Impartial arbiter?
The Inquisitor adjudicates

A second issue is the assumption that the Matrix cannot be challenged.  The Matrix is the computer-based depository of all Time Lord knowledge and experience.  When the Doctor insists that evidence from the Matrix has been falsified, the Inquisitor pre-judges the issue, telling the Doctor “your accusation would be laughable if it were not so outrageous”. The problem of certain forms of evidence being considered unchallengable may have had resonance in the mid 1980s when “The Trial of a Time Lord” was written.  It was an era in which the evidence of the British police, whilst often relied upon at trial, was becoming increasingly discredited as miscarriages of justice mounted up.  As a result the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 ushered in the tape-recording of interviews.  Such recordings now form the focus of a very large number of criminal trials, as well as a long-standing trope in British television crime drama.

A third issue is the upgrading of the charge against the Doctor from interference to genocide.  Late in the trial we learn that the Doctor has destroyed an entire alien species, a race of sentient plants known as the Vervoids.   Instantly the Valeyard insists that the capital charge of genocide be added to the charges against the Doctor.   Yet the rules of procedural fairness include the right to adequate time to prepare one’s case (see for instance the ruling of the High Court in R v Thames Magistrates’ Court ex parte Polemis [1974] WLR 1371).  To add new charges mid-trial would be an outrageous breach of that principle.

The Valeyard presses for the ultimate sanction

A fourth issue is the death penalty. The Valeyard strongly presses for the death penalty.  In Britain, Parliament effectively abolished the death penalty in 1965 after several miscarriages of justice, and in 2004 the UK government accepted the 13^th Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights which created an obligation in international law not to reintroduce it.   Britain does not extradite individuals who would face the death penalty in trials elsewhere.  The presence of the death penalty in Gallifreyan law marks Gallifrey as a more primitive society than Britain.

A fifth issue is the rule against bias.   It is a vintage principle of common law that judges should be impartial vis-à-vis the parties to a case (see e.g. Dimes v Grand Junction Canal I [1852] 10 ER 315).   The principle has also been enshrined in Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights.  Yet for all her gravitas, the Inquisitor eventually shows herself far from impartial: she defends rather too vigorously the Time Lords’ decision to extract the Doctor from time and space to face trial just as his companion, Peri, needed rescuing from imminent destruction.   Bias in the opposite direction is apparent at the trial’s end: the Inquisitor drops all charges against the Doctor because the Time Lords owe him a debt of gratitude for having saved their skins.   So much for the due process of law.

Eventually the Time Lords emerge discredited from the trial because of their own constant interference in time and space.  It is Time Lord hypocrisy which “The Trial of a Time Lord” ultimately condemns.  But as a result the appalling lapses in judicial procedure get sidelined.  Yet these deficiencies fall well short of the common law principle that it is not enough for justice to be done, it must be manifestly be seen to be done – through compliance with the requirements of procedural fairness.  This raises the important question of whether a conviction, however justified in substance, should ever be lawfully obtained on the basis of an unfair procedure.  The procedural corruption of the trial alone justifies the Doctor’s stirring denunciation:

In all my travellings throughout the universe, I have battled against evil, against power-mad conspirators. I should have stayed HERE! The oldest civilization: decadent, degenerate and rotten to the core! … Daleks, Sontarans, Cybermen - they're still in the nursery compared to us! Ten million years of absolute power - that's what it takes to be really corrupt!