Lord President aims to move Scots courts into the future

Lord Carloway is pictured in his office in Parliament House, Edinburgh. 1st December 2010. Picture: Jane Barlow

Changes could mean fewer witnesses in the courtroom, people pleading guilty online and a digital evidence vault

They are steeped in centuries of tradition and practice but Scottish court rooms now face a technological overhaul to pull them into the 21st century.

Lord Carloway, Lord President of the Court of Session, has set out his case as to how the court system can better reflect modern life - while streamlining the way that justice is served.

The most senior judge in Scotland suggested that defendants should be able to lodge a guilty plea at any time online - and that the need for witnesses to attend court could be greatly reduced by the use of pre-recorded video testimony.

In a recent address to the Law Society of Scotland, he said: “We now need to capture the benefits which 200 years of technological advances have given us. We certainly have not done so yet.”

He said modes of “truth finding” inherited form the “God-fearing” Victorian era were less relevant than today - and that use of video testimony could provide a more contemporaneous record of events compared to a witness appearing in court months or even years after an event.

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“In our age of technology, we must seize the moment and hold that, in the future, evidence might be presented to the court in a quite different, more advanced manner, than the appearance of the witness at court,” he said.