Read more Weird Cases

There is an old adage: “Be kind to everybody, you never know who might show up on the jury at your trial”.

Ideally, of course, if you were being tried, you’d want the jury to be as reasonable as you are. And that’s just how things have worked out for Pierre Piasco. He is set to be tried for murder in France and has been summoned to serve on his own jury.

Piasco, who is alleged to have shot a man, has said he will honour his civic duty and accept the state’s invitation for him to become a juror in his case.

The world's weirdest cases

From the man who sued God to the man who sued TV for making his wife fat, people turn to lawyers for the strangest things

The trial is set down for September at the Assize Court of Bouches-du-Rhone, when both sides will have a chance to review the jury composition. Article 256 of the French penal code, which prevents detained people from jury service, is something the prosecution are likely to bring to the court’s attention.

Judging yourself has been allowed in some cases in England but only if you’re a judge. In 1846, Mr Justice Maule was an appeal judge in a civil case that he had presided over in Northampton as the trial judge. Looking back at his own trial judgment, he said, “I think I was wrong”. But the other appeal judges disagreed with him. They said his original judgment had been right, so it stood as it was.

This practice of sitting on appeal on your own judgment has also been allowed in the United States. In 1847, Justice Bronson said that a judge was “wise enough to know he is fallible”. He went on to suggest, somewhat bizarrely, that a judge “is the very best man to sit in review upon his own judgments”. You get the feeling that litigants who left his courtroom aggrieved with his rulings would not have been delighted with the Bronson formula for the best way to run an appeal process.

People have sometimes appeared in the same case in two capacities. In 1985, Oresti Lodi sued himself in California in an unsuccessful attempt to gain a tax advantage but his action was dismissed by Shasta County Superior Court as a “slam-dunk frivolous complaint”.

Self-trial has also been recorded. Francis Evans Cornish was appointed Queen’s Counsel in Canada in 1857, aged 26. He became Winnipeg’s first elected Mayor in 1874, which gave him status as a magistrate. Arrested one evening by the police for being drunk in public, Cornish was ordered to appear later before a magistrate — that magistrate turned out to be himself. Sober by now, he convicted himself and fined himself five dollars with costs. But he was a fair and even-handed magistrate, always keen to see both sides of a case, so he then stated for the record: “Francis Evans Cornish, taking into consideration past good behaviour, your fine is remitted”.

Professor Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University. His recent book How the Law Works is published by HarperCollins

Times Recommends

• Clifford Chance sets out to improve its public image
• Bennett starts 16-year sentence for Refco fraud
• FSA challenged over insider trading case