Sitting on a jury seems an increasingly precarious business.

Janet Chapman this week joined the growing list of jury members who have taken the short jump across to the dock. Her crime was so ridiculous it reads like a rejected Shameless episode. Chapman had faced three weeks of a trial in Preston before she decided she’d had enough.

The enterprising jury member went to her doctor’s, got a sick note for a back complaint and hopped on the first flight to Malta.

From there she called in sick, leaving the concise message: ‘Hello, ‘This is Janet Chapman Juror Number ***. I won’t be attending court for a period of up to two weeks. I have got to return to the doctor next Tuesday. I have got sciatica. Thank you. Bye.’

Alas, the long arm of the law was in no mood to say goodbye to her, slapping on the handcuffs the moment she’d touched back down in Blighty. Recent months have seen a number of jurors hit with contempt charges as the court system tries to get a grip on unruly members of the public.

In December, a teenage student was sentenced to two weeks at Her Majesty’s Pleasure for choosing the musical Chicago over sitting on a jury. Earlier this year, Theodora Dallas’ inquisitiveness got the better of her and she was jailed for Googling the defendant. Last June, Joanne Fraill was sentenced to eight months for befriending a defendant on Facebook and bringing down a multi-million pound drugs trial.

Chapman was a fool, undoubtedly, and wasted an awful lot of time and expense, not least during the day she went AWOL before her holiday call-in. But her crime was against the state, a state that will now spend around £3,000 on incarcerating her.

Would her penance not have been better spent on a community sentence rather than taking another space in our overcrowded jails?

Chapman’s sentence is obviously a case of sending a message to the wider public, but with so many contempt cases in the headlines recently, the message isn’t getting through. Nobody is suggesting what she did was right, or even excusable. But this sentence is harsh, and smacks of a court system taking revenge on someone for daring to undermine it.

Let’s save jail for the real criminals - and order the likes of Chapman to do something constructive to pay their dues to society.

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