My computer is evil, so this will be brief.
“Justice secretary wants jury trials scrapped except in most serious cases”, the BBC reports:
Justice Secretary David Lammy is proposing to massively restrict the ancient right to a jury trial by only guaranteeing it for defendants facing rape, murder, manslaughter or other cases passing a public interest test.
An internal government briefing, produced by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) for all other Whitehall departments, confirms plans to create a new tier of jury-less courts in England and Wales.
The new courts would deal with most crimes currently considered by juries in Crown Court.
But the MoJ said no final decision had been taken by the government.
The plans, obtained by BBC News, show that Lammy, who is also deputy prime minister, wants to ask Parliament to end jury trials for defendants who would be jailed for up to five years.
The proposals are an attempt to end unprecedented delays and backlogs in courts, and do not apply to Scotland or Northern Ireland.
Here is what David Lammy said about juries in 2020:
David Lammy
@DavidLammy
Jury trials are a fundamental part of our democratic settlement. Criminal trials without juries are a bad idea.The Government need to pull their finger out and acquire empty public buildings across the country to make sure these can happen in a way that is safe.
12:20 pm · 20 Jun 2020
Juries are not perfect – we can all think of cases where the innocent have been found guilty by juries, and the guilty found not guilty, BUT – having cases decided by establishment judges is worse, far worse.
Trial by jury is one of the key things that set this island apart from the Continent – some “mainland Europe” nations did, at one time, have local juries of ordinary people, but this was crushed by the rise of the Medieval version of Roman Law (a very different thing from what Roman Law had been under the Republic – or even under the early Emperors), it would be a terrible tragedy to lose this.
“But the delays, the backlog…” – the delays are not caused by juries, they are caused by an institutionally messed up legal system, and that system can move very fast if it wants to – for example the “legal process” against “right wingers” after the protests of the summer of 2024 (basically drum head “justice”) happened very fast indeed.
The legal system is slow and builds up long delays – because it wants to, not because of juries.
Do what USED to be done in Scotland (sadly it no longer is done) set a maximum number of days between someone being charged and the start of the trial, and a maximum number of days the trial can last.
If the number of days is exceeded – the accused walks and may not be charged again for the same offense.
Then the legal officials would get-their-finger-out.
“The plans, obtained by BBC News, show that Lammy, who is also deputy prime minister, wants to ask Parliament to end jury trials for defendants who would be jailed for up to five years.”
I assume that “Thoughtcrime” and “Opposition to the Will of the State” will have sentences of less than 5 years.
Subotai Bahadur
Paul – re. the old Scottish system, there is unfortunately a lot of scope there for two tier justice, i.e. anything anti-government gets fast tracked, anything the government tacitly approves of just happens to run out of time.