In his 1851 essay 'On Women', Arthur Schopenhauer states : The fundamental flaw in the character of women is that they have no sense of justice.... from this defect, and all it involves, spring falseness, faithlessness, treachery, ungratefulness...... In a court of justice, women are more often found guilty of perjury than men. It is indeed to be generally questioned whether they should be allowed to take an oath at all.

It's just over 100 years since women were allowed to serve on juries in British courts. Back in 1991, I had to do jury service. I hadn't read any Schopenhauer, and, if I had, I'd have seen his writing as the outdated ravings of someone from the mid-19th Century, his thoughts entirely irrelevant to the late 20th Century, and the daily life of an enlightened thirty-five year old family man. Then, I sat through two trials, and watched the perpetrators get away with their warped misdeeds. The term 'miscarriage of justice' is entirely appropriate, as the behaviour of the female jurors was the root cause. However, their irrational and entitled actions would have failed, had it not been for the male jurors who pandered to their every wish.

I couldn't believe what I was witnessing. In the intervening months, I wrote it off as some kind of aberration, a fluke occurrence due to the personalities in those jury rooms. Then, as years went by, and I learned some harsh life lessons, it became apparent that this is going on everywhere. Women have made inroads into every aspect of life, the workplace, the courts, politics, big business.... and men are bending over backwards to facilitate nonsense, sowing the seeds of havoc.

I'm no author. But, got some of it out of my system in an e-book 'The Jury', by Dan Murdoch (a pen name), free for a few days. Were some of the defendants 'too pretty for prison, with good looks and money trumping justice? Or was Schopenhauer right?