Trial by jury
We must be ‘bold’, says justice secretary
Investment in our courts is necessary but not sufficient, the justice secretary said this week. “Unless we do things differently,” Shabana Mahmood told guests at the lord mayor’s annual dinner for the judges, “backlogs will rise and justice will be delayed for ever longer”.
That why she had invited Sir Brian Leveson to carry out an independent review of the criminal courts and recommend “once-in-a-generation reforms” to help ministers “bear down on the backlog” of cases awaiting trial.
The justice secretary had asked the former head of criminal justice to consider “one of the most fundamental questions of all — which cases should receive a trial by jury if we are to ensure that justice is swifter”.
And Leveson would be publishing his initial findings “very soon”, she promised.
“Knowing Sir Brian,” she continued, “his report will be methodical and is unlikely to be short. But, most importantly, it must be bold if we are to reverse the rising backlogs in our courts.”
What does “bold” mean in the context of reducing the proportion of cases tried by jury? That’s the subject of my column for this week’s Law Society Gazette. To read it, click here and then click anywhere on the right-hand page.
At mode of trial proceedings in the magistrates’ court, prosecution and defence have the opportunity to argue whether a case should be dealt with summarily or at Crown court. Where this leads to a decision to hear the case summarily, why then is the defendant given the unqualified right to elect jury trial?
“remain mandatory for the most serious cases except …….” asserts Joshua in his as ever timely and helpful Gazette article. Now, there’s the rub.
I say yet again: governments HATE jury trials; however tolerant or even supportive in opposition, once in office with what it sees as its prerogative to pursue its “strategy of the week/month/year” the separation of the powers tends very much to be an optional extra to be boasted of when things are proceeding smoothly but there to be tinkered with when it should prove to be a thundering nuisance. And so- I WILL say it again- fraud trials and other complex cases:” clearly beyond the poor dears on the jury” ( in fact for the lawyers and the judge to have presented to OUR peers chosen at random in plain English and succinctly) . As to “less serious (sic: less serious to whom), clearly too expensive and adding to the delay- tick. Then highly charged, “political” cases, perhaps with personal dangers attached for jurors? Tick. And then, give it a short time to bed down, and then “ little point, really, in clinging on to the remaining wreckage of those cases still requiring juries, surely?…….Job done! At least if the government of the day intent upon this would come straight out with it and declare this to be the overall aim. But then, hold on now : that isn’t the way we do things, is it? Silly me.