Between 1993 and 2011, defendants were acquitted of all charges in 55.4 per cent of judge-alone trials compared with 29 per cent of jury trials. However, more than nine times as many cases were heard by a jury than a judge alone. Mark Findlay, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Sydney, said judges were less likely to be guided by emotion. ''Many, if not most, cases which go to judge alone rest on facts which would be disturbing to the person in the street, or they involve an accused who may have had some previous form or some current celebrity and so a jury would not approach the case or the accused objectively or without emotion,'' he said. ''On the other hand, it would be fair to assume that judges would be less impressed by disturbing facts, and would be more able to put out of their minds extraneous issues about the case or the offender.''

The NSW government changed the law in 2011 so that defendants could apply to the court for a judge-alone trial, removing the requirement for the prosecutor to consent. It is now up to the court to decide if it is ''in the interests of justice'' for a defendant to be tried by a judge alone in cases where the prosecutor wants a jury. Justice McCallum ruled in October that it was in the interests of justice for Mr Gittany to be tried without a jury because he had been refused legal aid and a judge-alone trial would be two weeks shorter. This avoided the risk he would run out of funds and have to represent himself. However, Justice McCallum made clear that alleged adverse publicity did not support the case for a judge-alone trial and ''the interests of justice are not to be confused with the interests of the accused''. It was significant that a witness could have been unavailable to give evidence if the trial was delayed to give Mr Gittany time to raise more funds.

Former NSW director of public prosecutions Nicholas Cowdery said the statistics were ''not surprising at all'' in light of the kind of matters that went to a judge-alone trial. He said most of the cases involved narrow and technical issues that could be resolved more quickly without a jury. ''The bulk of them come down to a small area of dispute in which neither side will move which, if contested on strong grounds from the defence side, will be more likely to give rise to a reasonable doubt,'' he said. Mr Cowdery said the change to the law in 2011 could have affected the kinds of cases that went to a judge-alone trial. The year the laws were introduced, no defendants tried by a Supreme Court judge alone were acquitted of all charges, compared with 37 per cent of cases heard by a jury. Loading

Some judges specialising in criminal law have expressed doubt about the efficacy of juries in dealing with expert evidence. They are also more expensive than judge-alone trials. But Mr Cowdery said he believed ''juries perform a valuable role in connecting the community with criminal justice and in bringing into the process the community's values and standards''.