I Was A Juror. Lammy’s Proposals Are Misguided.

Never has time felt more like a construct than in the jurors waiting room at Wolverhampton Crown Court – once inside, you’d be hard pushed to guess the decade let alone how long you’d be kept waiting. There are three clocks dotted along the pale blue walls and no television; the Wi-Fi works (just about). Fifties-style dinner ladies are arbitrarily summoned by a bell to dish out fish fingers, chips, and beans whilst queues spring up at the vending machines for hot drinks that poorly resemble lattes. I don’t know how much time I spent in that room over my two weeks of jury service, but I do know that it was a special kind of torture.  

Nor has civic duty, the thing legally binding me and a hundred others to such torture, ever felt so uninspiring. (Perhaps four years of reading political philosophy really does fill your head with grand notions about words like duty and constitution and justice). No, in action my civic duty left much to be desired; having been chosen to sit on two trials – rape and robbery respectively – as one of the ‘twelve men good and true’, I got front-row seats to watch the crumbling of the country’s justice system.    

The crimes in question occurred some years ago – the rape was reported during a Covid lockdown. We were repeatedly dismissed and made to wait longer still, as bits of crucial evidence and legal explainers had not been printed out for us to see. Judges, undoubtedly doing their best, had other matters to attend to midway through the hearings. Oh, the waiting! What could have been an open-and-shut case – had the CCTV footage of the robbery been in black and white it would have resembled a Laurel and Hardy sketch – took almost four days to conclude. 

It doesn’t take a genius, the justice secretary, or someone to have completed jury service to know that the system desperately needs reforming. You need only watch the news. The court backlog sits at 78,000, double the figure in 2020, and is expected to reach 100,000 by 2028. As in the cases I heard, plaintiffs and defendants alike are having their lives suspended as they await justice, and ultimately, justice delayed is justice denied. The longer that victims of sexual offences are made to wait for their trials, the more likely they are to drop out; those that remain are less likely to be believed by a jury as the grounds for reasonable doubt grow. 

This is the foreground of David Lammy’s argument for his controversial reforms that will see an end to most jury trials. Having once claimed that jury trials are a “fundamental part of our democratic settlement”, with it enshrined in the Magna Carta that “no free man shall be seized or imprisoned except by the lawful judgement of his equals”, Lammy is now proposing that juries will only be used to decide murder, rape, manslaughter, and ‘public interest’ cases in the future, in a bid to slash the backlog. Instead, judges will sit alone to hear up to 75%  of criminal trials. 

There is some merit to these proposals. 90% of cases are already tried by magistrates, with only 3% going to jury trial. When cases do, they can feel highly procedural and inefficient, a reminder of Britain’s curious knack for preserving archaic and stagnant systems in the name of tradition. Almost no other European country uses juries (though it is worth noting that European systems tend to be inquisitorial and not adversarial). Those chosen for jury service are largely apathetic, finding the experience as thrilling as going to the dentist. Besides, can we really justify getting a jury to give up a year of their lives to hear a complex fraud or cybercrime case they are unlikely to ever understand? And what about that backlog? Something needs to give. 

Lammy, however, is misguided if he thinks these proposals are the answer; jury trials were never the problem in the criminal justice system crisis and so removing them will not be the solution. Any real solution requires a level of funding that the Ministry of Justice is simply unwilling to find. Extending the sitting days of the courts, training more barristers and judges, ensuring the courts’ infrastructure is fit for purpose, increasing legal aid funding – all would be far more potent solutions for cutting through the courts backlog. 

Besides, to claim that there is no right to a jury trial – as Justice Secretary Lammy does – is to understate the vital guardrail juries provide against an overmighty state. In ‘either-way’ cases, which will now be heard in judge-only trials, juries, buoyed by 12 competing biases, might give much fairer assessments of ‘guilt’ and ‘wrong-doing’ than a judge ever could. Where a judge sees only criminal damage, a jury might acquit, as was the case for the Colston Four who were tried for tearing down the statue of slave trader Edward Colston. Where assault is unmistakable to a judge, a jury might see that it occurred in an act of self-defence. Whilst such decisions are commonly cited as flaws of the jury trial, they function as strengths; that 12 ordinary men and women must first be convinced that you deserve the state to take your freedom away is a powerful counterbalance to a possible Leviathan. 

As judges become more politicised, and the far-right surge in the polls, we would do well to remember such a thing. Concentrating greater power in the hands of a few judges will not necessarily aid the victims of crime, but it will lay the groundwork for Reform UK should they gain power and seek to copy their MAGA counterparts, transforming the judiciary into an ideological battlefield. That these proposals help make this future a possibility should scare us all. Labour might find that it comes to haunt them. 

Lammy, then, should rethink these proposals, watering them down at the very least. Rather than having a judge alone hear a case, less serious offences could be heard by a judge and two magistrates – a recommendation from former Queen’s Bench Division President Sir Brian Leveson. Not ideal, but neither is a backlog of 100,000 cases. 

My fortnight of jury service revealed many things to me, not least of all that patience is a virtue. The system is in crisis and justice grinding to a slow halt. But removing juries, one of the few bulwarks against an overbearing executive and an emblem of legitimate British jurisprudence, is not the answer.  

Image: Flickr/House of Commons

Licence.

No image changes made.