3 days ago
19
Abolition of trial by jury in England and Wales in all but the most serious cases is not the official policy of Sir Keir Starmer’s government – yet. All the signs, however, are that it soon will be. The leak of a Ministry of Justice (MoJ) briefing this week suggests that the lord chancellor, David Lammy, has signed off a plan restricting jury trial to a narrow band of serious offences – murder, manslaughter, rape and cases passing a public interest test. An announcement could come soon, with legislation in the new year.
If Mr Lammy has his way, a new lower tier of juryless crown courts would hear most cases now heard by juries. Those involving criminal charges carrying a maximum sentence of up to five years would be heard by judges in the planned crown court “bench division”. Juries would no longer hear fraud and financial crime cases either. This would mean a large majority of the more than 30,000 jury trials each year in England and Wales being heard instead by judges alone, at an estimated saving of 20% of trial time.
Mr Lammy’s plan, if confirmed, goes beyond Sir Brian Leveson’s July report, commissioned by the MoJ, on the entire criminal justice system. Sir Brian set the limit to juryless trial at cases carrying a likely sentence of three years, not five. He also proposed that juryless trials could be heard by a judge sitting with two magistrates, potentially ensuring a lay element. Mr Lammy appears to have ignored these more sensible ideas.
The context for the Leveson proposals and Mr Lammy’s move is the mounting backlog of criminal cases. The backlog is indisputable. It requires action. Some 78,000 crown court cases are waiting to be heard. Some defendants being charged today will not have their cases heard for three years. If nothing changes by March 2029, the MoJ projects that the backlog will reach 105,000, generating still lengthier delays.
Jury trials for the most serious offences have doubled in length since 2001 – a genuine concern. Yet it is far from clear that juries – who only hear around 1% of all criminal cases – are particularly responsible for the wider criminal justice system crisis. To single out juries as the part of the system crying out for reform would be misleading and would not solve the larger problem, which involves the neglect of the magistrates courts too.
The wider issue is that the MoJ has been an unprotected department in successive austerity public spending rounds. Funding was cut by 30% in the coalition years. The MoJ is still unprotected today. Covid compounded everything further, as did the rising complexity of investigations, including digital and financial crime, and of the trial process itself. The whole system has been knowingly rendered less efficient, even while demands on it have been increased.
Juries are not the sole or even the main blockage in this. Nothing entitles the jury system to immunity from reform. There is an argument for reasoned restrictions on juries in particular cases, like fraud, for example, or in special circumstances, such as those already applying in Northern Ireland. But successive governments have made dangerous and deliberate spending choices to shrink the criminal justice system and thus make it less efficient. That policy could have been reversed in this week’s budget, if the government had wanted to. Taking its frustrations out on the iconic tradition of trial by jury is a shabby evasion of responsibility.
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