Under British and Australian laws a jury in a criminal case has no access to information about the defendant's past criminal record. This protects the person who is being accused of the crime. Some lawyers have suggested that this practice should be changed and that a jury should be given all the past facts before they reach their decision about the case. Do you agree or disagree? Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

With the rise of urbanization and technology development, whether to give jury in a criminal case with information about defendant's past criminal record has become the subject of heated debate. There can be many positive and negative sides of all the facts that must be given to jury while judgement. In this essay, I shall explain my point of view by analyzing both sides of this argument with my experience till now before deducing a proper conclusion. Beforehand, it can be said that are many benefits in providing complete record of lawbreaker to judges for example help them to analyze level of his past criminal cases and the case for which they are going to provide judgement. There may be case that offender has done some less violation as compared to present one which will help judges to give better decision and can query more better about his current misdeed, what made him to do this violation, what are was the reason etc. On the other hand, those who argue that the jury should not provide with past records of culprit have different perspective. They may consider that the judgment for crime done by offender should be based on the crime he has done rather than his past records. To sum up, what has been discussed above, it is my opinion that judges must provide with the past record of offender before giving any decision of his crime. However, there will undoubtedly will some negative consequences of this approach like judging culprit based on this past record rather than present.