Britain’s Courts Are Broken. The Government’s Cure Targets the Jury

For years the warning lights have been flashing in England and Wales. Crown Court backlogs have more than doubled since twenty nineteen. On some measures the system is carrying the equivalent of more than one hundred thousand pre pandemic cases. Trials for rape and other serious offences are being listed years into the future. In some court centres victims are told to expect a trial date closer to the end of the decade than the end of the year.

This is not an unfortunate delay. It is the point at which justice quietly fails. Witnesses forget and move away. Complainants give up. Defendants live for years under a cloud of unresolved accusation. Everyone involved learns the same lesson, which is that the machinery of the state is very good at arresting you and very bad at giving you an answer.

The causes are not mysterious. Successive governments treated the criminal courts as a cost centre to be managed down. Buildings were closed and allowed to decay. Sitting days were rationed. Legal aid was squeezed until parts of the defence profession walked away. When the pandemic hit, the system finally cracked. None of this was a surprise to the people working inside it.

The response now being prepared is not to reverse those choices. It is to take a knife to a core safeguard and present that move as modernisation. Instead of funding more judges, more court rooms and more staff, ministers want to change who decides guilt.

The plan to shrink the jury

At the heart of the coming legislation is a simple idea. Carve out a large category of cases that would once have gone to a jury, and push them into a new tier of judge only trials. The leaked proposals attributed to the justice secretary talk about a new division of the Crown Court, where a single judge would try most cases that are expected to lead to sentences of five years or less.

Murder, manslaughter and rape would keep their juries. So would a small group of offences given some special public interest label. The rest, including a great many cases that can wreck a life and reputation, would be heard by a professional alone.

Running alongside this is the blueprint drawn up by Sir Brian Leveson in his independent review. He favours a slightly lower threshold. In his model jury trial is reserved for cases where the likely sentence is three years or more. Below that line, cases would be handled by judges and magistrates in a new intermediate structure. He estimates that restricting jury trials along these lines might save around nine thousand Crown Court sitting days out of roughly one hundred ten thousand each year.

On the page this all sounds tidy. Give juries to the worst offences, move everyone else into a streamlined process, declare victory over delay. The political message writes itself. Hard choices, modern courts, victims put first.

Look more closely and something else comes into focus. The one point in the criminal process where ordinary citizens still hold direct power is the jury room. For a few days or weeks twelve people who are not part of the permanent state step into a court and decide whether the state has proved its case against one of their peers. The new model would sharply reduce how often that happens.

What a jury is really for

In a common law system the jury is not decoration. It is a way of sharing power. Parliament writes the offences. Ministers lean on prosecutors. Judges interpret the law and manage the trial. The jury is where an ordinary citizen can sit in judgment on the story the state is telling about another human being.

That matters for at least three reasons. It prevents the same professional caste from writing the rules, building the case and deciding when guilt is proven. It gives serious criminal verdicts a kind of democratic legitimacy that pure judge made decisions struggle to match. And it protects the judiciary, because controversial outcomes are owned by a civic panel that dissolves at the end of the case, not by a single name and face that can be dragged through tabloid headlines.

Take juries out of a large slice of the criminal calendar and you change that balance. You concentrate more power in the hands of insiders at a moment when public trust in institutions is already thin. You expose judges to direct political heat for verdicts in culture war cases. You send a message to communities who already distrust the system that they are good enough to be policed and punished but not good enough to decide.

The thin efficiency argument

Supporters of the new model insist they are simply being realistic. Juries are slower. Judges are capable. Delay is a form of injustice. On this telling the choice is brutal but clear. Keep full jury rights and accept a system that is collapsing under its own ideals, or trim those rights so that victims can see a court room before their memories fade.

There is some truth buried in this. Juries do take time. Trials with twelve strangers in the box are less predictable than those run entirely within the trade. But the efficiency argument begins to collapse once you look at the numbers rather than the slogans.

Juries sit in a small minority of criminal cases. Most offences are dealt with in magistrates courts without a jury at all. Even in the Crown Court a large share of cases plead or fall away. The independent analysis used by the government’s own review suggests that the proposed cuts to jury trial would save less than a tenth of Crown Court sitting days. That is worth having, but it does not justify calling this the only serious option.

There is another path that ministers prefer not to discuss because it points straight back at them. It involves time, money and admitting that the crisis is the result of deliberate choices. It would mean reopening or replacing closed courtrooms. It would mean restoring and expanding sitting days. It would mean rebuilding a defence profession that can actually run trials, instead of watching barristers and solicitors drift into better paid work. It would mean investing in digital systems that speed up disclosure and case management instead of drowning everyone in badly organised files.

The risk of a one way door

Any restriction on jury trials will be sold as temporary, a crisis measure to clear the backlog. History offers a quieter lesson. Powers introduced as emergency responses have a habit of sticking. Once a safeguard has been trimmed back, it rarely returns in full. The narrower baseline becomes normal. Future ministers inherit a criminal justice system with fewer juries and can push the line further without the same resistance.

There is also the subtler question of how judges behave when they know they alone will carry the blame for unpopular verdicts. It is not hard to imagine the headlines when a single judge acquits a protester or a defendant in a charged racial case. The jury system was built in part to keep that pressure off the bench. A reform that heaps it back on would come with costs that do not show up in neat charts about sitting days.

None of this is an argument for leaving the courts as they are. Long delays in serious criminal cases are not acceptable. They damage victims and defendants and corrode any sense that the system is serious. The real question is where you look when you decide what must give.

One answer is to go after the visible symbol. Blame the jury, trim it down, and pretend that you have done something bold. Another is to face the reality that a decade of cuts produced today’s backlog and that reversing that damage is slow, expensive and politically inconvenient.

From the outside, the choice reveals what a government really values. If ministers genuinely believe that trial by jury is one of Britain’s defining contributions to the idea of fair justice, then it is the last place they should be looking for savings. If they do not, then the country should at least be told plainly that in the name of clearing the lists, they are willing to trade away one of the last moments when ordinary citizens can say yes or no to the power of the state.

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