Scaling back juries won’t fix justice delays

Like many members of the legal profession, I am gravely concerned by the government’s plans to scale-back jury trials. The Lord Chancellor’s proposals stand to achieve nothing in alleviating criminal justice delays and instead threaten to shift a problem downstream in pursuit of a political agenda.

Nobody with any experience of the criminal justice system in recent years would deny that backlogs are having a severe, detrimental impact on the speed and standard of justice. I am now routinely acting on behalf of clients accused of offences like rape and sexual assault with court dates as distant as 2029 and advising on cases with an excess of five years between arrest and trial. I have seen too many examples of lives ruined by inexplicable delays, which punish defendants prematurely and leave genuine victims of crime in limbo. 

I am also under no illusion that jury trials are perfect. As a criminal defence solicitor of over 20 years, I have seen many cases where juries have returned verdicts I thought highly improbable - convicting defendants I was sure would be acquitted, and acquitting others when I believed a conviction was certain. This is the cause of great frustration for many solicitors and barristers, but also one of the particular hallmarks of the jury system. It is a supremely democratic thing that lawyers can present their arguments and the judge can give their directions - but the decision as to a person’s guilt ultimately lies in the hands of 12 of his or her peers.

Juries are evidently not the reason for criminal justice delays - to the extent that it hardly seems worth scrutinising the government’s logic. In my view, the backlogs crisis is simply being used as a convenient excuse for ministers to pursue an ideological objective, which is supplanting hundreds of years of English justice with an inquisitorial, European-style judicial system. This may be described as conjecture or conspiratorialism, but this particular political agenda has been obvious for decades; from the proliferation of human rights law to the rise of ‘lawfare’ activism, some politicians believe in the supremacy of judges - and particularly judges of a certain background and political persuasion. I have no doubt that the present crisis in the courts is simply being used as an expedient excuse to achieve these aims, and ultimately increase the rate of conviction.

If the government were serious about addressing criminal justice delays, then they might have spent the time devoted to their radical reforms on instead developing a workable solution. In my experience, very few trials have been delayed or derailed by issues with a jury, whereas many have suffered as a result of the blundering way our criminal justice system is run. On multiple occasions, I have seen hearings postponed when third-party prison staff failed to transport the defendant to court in time, or where administrative errors meant that translators or witnesses were given the wrong dates, times, or locations to attend. A great many weak or unviable cases are proceeding to court that should not, but there remains perishingly little funding available for most law firms to engage in proactive pre-charge engagement with the police and the prosecution. These are all issues that could be addressed with relative ease, but the government clearly has little interest in doing so. 

Even if these reforms did alleviate the backlogs, I fail to see what more convictions alone would achieve. Our prisons are full, with community orders and diversionary measures increasingly used in place of custodial sentences. Judges are more likely to convict than juries, but this will not suddenly result in a magical transformation of our crumbling prisons estate. Cases may also be processed marginally faster, as the Lord Chancellor presumably hopes - but only if the Magistrates’ Courts are given the investment, facilities and resources needed to handle such a significant increase in their caseload. The same problem applies to appeals, and whilst the automatic right to appeal to the Crown Court is expected to be curtailed, I still envisage many defendants seeking to challenge their conviction on the basis that their cases were handled too quickly by Mr Lammy’s so-called ‘Swift Courts’. Put simply, the problem will just be shifted from one part of the justice system to another.

The reality is that the government’s reforms are political, but also politically misguided. They will not succeed in resolving the backlogs, but may eventually result in the abolition of jury trials altogether - a doctrine that has been central to English justice for centuries.