In 2017 David Lammy, now Secretary of State for Justice and Deputy Prime Minister conducted a review of prejudice in the Criminal Justice system and he concluded that Juries “act as a filter against prejudice”. In 2020 he went further, saying “Criminal trials without juries are a bad idea. You don’t fix the backlog with trials that are widely perceived as unfair.”
He was right.
Now however, he is pushing ahead with an agenda to restrict trial by jury to only the most serious crimes of murder or rape. When challenged with the ancient right of subjects to be tried by their fellows, as set out in 1215 in Magna Carta, arguably our most important constitutional document, his answer was that Magna Carta also required that justice be swift.
So, faced with a growing backlog of cases giving rise to long delays, sometimes years before alleged offenders can actually face trial, he has prioritised the speed with which offences can come to court, over the right to trial by Jury. Accordingly, he will introduce legislation to empower a judge to sit alone, or with magistrates, to determine guilt or innocence in our crown courts.
That there is a backlog of hundreds of thousands of cases awaiting trial, is not in dispute. It arises from a number of inefficiencies, and it certainly wasn’t helped by closing the courts down for a year during Covid. There is a shortage of criminal barristers, -it is better remunerated to practice civil and commercial law. Equally, courts sit empty because governments have not funded the Department of Justice with a budget sufficient to staff them.
One of the statistics that Lammy preyed in aid, was that because of the current delays, 60% of rape victims withdraw rather than face the trauma of a long wait before trial. He is now in a spat with senior barristers who accuse him of a cynical attempt to justify his proposals on the basis of misinformation, because the majority of accusations are withdrawn before charges are brought, with only 8 percent being withdrawn post- charges and awaiting trial.
As I pointed out to the Minister of State, when she stressed the rights of victims for swift justice, governing is about choices: the Government could have funded more sitting days in the courts, instead, the Chancellor’s budget prioritised benefits recipients over victims.
If the purpose of this measure is to clear the backlog, then the legislation should contain a ‘sunset clause’ to return the status quo ante once the backlog is cleared. Last week, when the Parliamentary Under-secretary was before the Joint Human Rights Committee, I pressed him on exactly that point, but I could extract no such concession. So, I conclude this is an ideological agenda (Just as the last Labour government also tried to restrict jury trials) rather than just an expedient to deal with a backlog of cases.
To-day, the Minister of State returned to the Commons to answer a further urgent question.
Last week Lammy had told us that only 3% of prosecutions end up actually going before a jury. So, I asked her to publish the modelling so we could see how reducing the small number of such trials even further could save much time, given that there are already so few.
Others, piled in after me to see if we could get any clarity on the work that the Government has already done to quantify the benefit of this assault on liberty. She avoided answering. All she would say is that an impact assessment will be published when the legislation id brought to the Commons.
I can’t wait!