Former Attorney General Saul Froomkin has launched a defence of special juries and has questioned why Government is in such a rush to abolish them.

The former top prosecutor won two cases using the system, including the case against Alvin Chapman who was accused of running a drugs supermarket in Hamilton.

But other lawyers have argued that special juries are unnecessary and tend to exclude black jurors.

Mr. Froomkin, who stepped down as Attorney General in the early 1990s, said people got it wrong when they thought special juries meant hand-picked juries. In reality they were selected at random from the ordinary jury pool but had been pre-identified, said Mr. Froomkin.

The Jurors Act 1971 gives the power to the Revising Tribunal which assesses jurors to certify those who are: ?By reason of his education, qualifications, occupation or experience, a fit and proper person to be a special juror, then the Revising Tribunal shall record that fact on the preliminary list.?

Mr. Froomkin denied the definition was vague and said they serve a purpose in long cases involving many defendants which might be too much for normal jurors.

But defence counsel Victoria Pearman said she fundamentally disagreed with the concept of special juries and pointed out that an ordinary jury had been able to cope with the long-running Lagoon Park murder case in which three men were accused of killing American Stanley Lee.

She said: ?I think it is insulting to the people of Bermuda to have special juries.?

The measure abolishing special juries ? the Criminal Code Amendment (No. 3) Act 2004 ? was passed by the House of Assembly on Monday and will go to the Senate this Monday.

But the Opposition have said it was a political ploy because the Department of Public Prosecutions had applied to have a special jury for lawyer Julian Hall?s March 2005 fraud trial. The former Progressive Labour Party MP has been charged with stealing more than $500,000 from widow Betty Loraine McMahon.

The recent Justice Review Committee, on which both Mr. Froomkin and Ms Pearman served, recommended special juries be abolished but Mr. Froomkin said it was hardly a priority.

He said: ?Why, of all the important recommendations, was this one picked all by itself as opposed to five or six others it went along with?

?I still don?t understand but obviously Government knows what it is doing.?

He said more important recommendations, such as protecting vulnerable witnesses and enacting legislation governing the way Police interview suspects, should have been tackled first.

But Ms Pearman questioned the political motives behind the way special juries were brought back to Bermuda after being abolished in 1951.

Special juries were used in the Troy Shorter case when he was convicted of murdering the murder of Roger Redman at Hayward?s Grocery and the trial and conviction of five men for the attack on narcotics Policeman Patrick Hamlett in his Devil?s Hole home in 1984.

Most famously, a special jury was used in the 1976 case against Larry Tacklyn and Buck Burrows who were convicted, and then executed, for the murder of two men at the Shopping Centre.

In a paper written for the International and Comparative Law Quarterly in 1989, Ian Kawaley, now a Supreme Court judge, argued that Bermuda?s special jury laws had the systematic effect of excluding from special jury service all but a small elite section of the community.

?Statistical evidence suggests that black Bermudians are also excluded in representative terms,? he wrote.

He went on: ?The reintroduction of special jury trial in 1971 not only sought to turn back the political clock, it was surely in violation of the letter and spirit of section 6 of the Constitution and the right to a fair and impartial trial by jury.?