Still Blind. Still Silent.

A follow-up Freedom of Information request confirms what the first set of responses implied. Scotland's courts have not discussed fixing the recording gap in ten years. And they have no plans to start now.

When we published Blind Spots in the System on the 14th March 2026, the finding at its centre was that Scotland's criminal case management system cannot meaningfully record how key trial procedures are used. Section 275 applications get one marker per case regardless of how many are made. The Moorov doctrine leaves no administrative trace at all. The Crown Office holds no guidance on the risk of witness contamination in multi-complainant cases.

A reasonable response to that would be: the system has limitations, but surely someone is working to address them.

A further Freedom of Information request, submitted to the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service on 12 March 2026 and answered on 23 March, puts that assumption to rest.

No fields. No documentation. No discussion.

The request asked three things. First, whether any electronic fields or markers exist within the criminal case management system for jury directions, corroboration issues or evidential doctrines. Second, whether any system design documentation or administrative instructions exist describing what court staff are required to record about jury directions. Third, and most significantly, whether any project, proposal or discussion has taken place within the last ten years regarding the addition of searchable fields for evidential doctrines such as Moorov.

The answer to all three was no.

On the first two points, the SCTS confirmed under Section 17 of FOISA that the information simply does not exist. There are no fields, no markers, no documentation. The system was built to process cases and records nothing beyond what is needed for that purpose. As the response states, there is no operational requirement to record information about jury directions, corroboration issues or evidential doctrines.

On the third point, the SCTS went further than FOISA required. The question was framed as a request for confirmation rather than recorded information, which technically falls outside FOISA's scope. But the SCTS chose to answer it anyway, consulting both its Management Information Analysis Team and its Executive Director of Court Operations before responding. The answer, confirmed after those consultations, was that in the last ten years there has been no project, proposal or discussion about adding searchable fields relating to evidential doctrines.

Not a shelved proposal. Not a discussion that went nowhere. Nothing at all.

No plans to measure the impact of Daly and Keir

An earlier response under FOI 2026-065 had already confirmed a related point that deserves to be read alongside this new response. When asked whether SCTS anticipated publishing any statistical material concerning the practical impact of Daly and Keir v HM Advocate [2025] UKSC 38, the SCTS confirmed there are currently no plans to produce or publish such material.

That ruling, decided by the UK Supreme Court in November 2025, found that Scotland's courts had been applying Section 275 in ways incompatible with the right to a fair trial for over a decade. Reform is now legally required. But the body responsible for administering Scotland's courts has no plans to measure what that reform will need to address or how the previous unlawful approach operated in practice.

You cannot measure what the system never recorded. And there are apparently no plans to start recording it now.

What the responses establish together

Taken as a set, the FOI responses now in the public domain through this site establish the following position clearly and from the institutions' own words.

The Moorov doctrine, which allows separate allegations to corroborate each other and can be decisive in whether a prosecution succeeds, is not recorded in any searchable form in Scotland's court management system. The same system records only whether a Section 275 application occurred in a given case, not how many applications were made, at what stage, or what decisions were reached on each. There is no system documentation describing what should be recorded about jury directions. The Crown Office holds no guidance on the risk that witnesses in multi-complainant cases may become aware of each other's accounts during investigation, despite legal scholarship having addressed that risk for decades. And in ten years, nobody within SCTS has formally proposed changing any of this.

The courts are not concealing these gaps. They have answered every question put to them with reasonable candour. The problem is not bad faith. It is that a system this consequential, one that determines what evidence juries hear and how allegations are allowed to support each other, has never been designed with scrutiny in mind. And there is no indication that is about to change.

Sources

• Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service — FOI 2026-065
• Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service — FOI 2026-067
• Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service — FOI 2026-037
• Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service — FOI 2026-096
• Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service — R-17242-26

The Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service and the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service were invited to comment on the issues discussed in this article. No responses were received before publication.