What do proposals to scrap jury trials mean for our justice system?

0:02Hi, I'm Charlie Duffield, and welcome back to The Standard Podcast. If you're new here, hit follow and give us a rating. For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk. Coming up later in the show. What could the government's proposals to scrap jury trials mean for democracy? We're talking here about the alteration of a really fundamental principle of our justice, and no one should underestimate how serious that is. But first, since the 13th century, it's been a cornerstone of British democracy and is even included in the Magna Carta, but the government could soon come close to scrapping the right to trial by jury.

0:49Justice Secretary David Lammy is proposing to massively restrict this ancient right. There are plans to create a new tier of courts in England and Wales, removing guarantees to a jury trial for all except those accused of the most serious crimes, such as rape, murder, manslaughter or other cases in the public interest. But could this still result in a fair trial? Here's what the former judge, Wendy Joseph Casey, had to say when speaking on BBC Breakfast. This is an absolutely fundamental change. The question that arises is babies and bathwaters. Trown court judges, those who sit on jury trials, at the moment never make findings of fact in the sense of guilt or innocence.

1:37There may be very, very rare and esoteric situations where they have to. But by and large, it's always been the province of your listeners, of all of us, of the jury, to make that really important decision, guilty or not. So judges have no training in how to find facts. There is one mind working if you've only got one judge sitting on the case. At the moment, we have a system where 12 people from 12 different lives with 12 different sets of experiences pool those experiences and work together to try and find the right, the true verdict. It will not be the same if one person does it. And a lot of judges will feel very uncomfortable about it.

2:28What you will get is quicker trials. You will get cheaper trials. And no one should underestimate the importance of that to the Ministry of Justice. What you may not get is the same quality of justice. It depends what you think really matters. Those of us who've worked in the law think that the cardinal, the essential thing that's important, is to get the right result. That is not to say that something doesn't have to be done about the backlog. It does. Years of neglect mean that, as former Justice Secretary Shibana Mahmoud declared from day one, the criminal justice system is on the verge of collapse and is in need of radical reform.

3:15It's due to concerns that a record backlog of 80 ,000 Crown Court cases shows no sign of dropping. In practice, this means that subjects charged with serious crimes today might not have a trial until 2029 or 2030. But is scrapping jury trials the answer? Lammy's proposals have been criticised by senior lawyers who insist they could destroy justice as we know it. Joining us now is the Standards Court's correspondent Tristan Kirk. Tristan, what's the difference between magistrates' courts and Crown Courts? And can you tell us a bit more about these new proposals? So in the magistrates' courts, it's either a panel of magistrates or a district judge that oversees criminal trials.

4:02Those are for the lower level offences. If a case goes up to the Crown Court at the moment, if you plead not guilty, it goes for a trial before judge and jury, which means that the judge manages the law and the jury decides on guilty or not guilty. We have an unprecedented crisis in the criminal courts right now. There are something like 80 ,000 cases waiting to be heard in the Crown Court backlog. There are trials now being set in 2030, so five years away. And that means that victims, witnesses, everybody involved are facing years of waiting to see justice being done, for defendants to be cleared or to know their fate, and for victims to be able to move on with their lives.

4:53That's the context to scale back the use of jury trials in the Crown Court, essentially to the very most serious of crimes, murder, manslaughter and rape. All else would either be sent to be tried in the magistrate's court or in a new division of the Crown Court where the trials would be overseen by a judge only, according to the reports that are coming out. So why is this action being taken? There was an independent review commission by the government earlier this year looking at how to solve the backlog and delays crisis in the courts. Sir Brian Leveson, who's a retired Court of Appeal judge, came back with a suite of measures which he says would help to start bringing down the backlog.

5:39It involves reclassifying some cases so that they're magistrate-only cases, putting a lot of extra money and using up court days to the maximum. But one of the most controversial measures was this idea of scaling back jury trials in order for cases that the theory is to be dealt with more efficiently. Whether that's actually the case is certainly debatable at this stage, but it involves establishing a whole new structure of court proceedings so that a judge sits on a trial, a serious trial, and decides guilty or not guilty instead of the jury deliberating. I've written in my piece that time savings are perhaps not going to be as big as it's maybe hoped.

6:25If you have a criminal trial in the Crown Court, it will be expected that trial will be heard in full. Evidence will have to be given in the same way that it does now. There'll have to be deliberations by a judge, even without a jury. That might be somewhat truncated, but the savings in terms of time, I think, would not be as massive as some people might expect. And why are you an advocate of trial by jury? There are lots of reasons why jury trial is treasured in this country. It is a system where if somebody is accused of a crime, a jury of their peers, a collection of random members of the public from all walks of life will hear all the evidence and then decide on guilty or not guilty.

7:08It is not in any way the state making a decision on a criminal case on somebody's guilt, whether they did the crime, it is not seen as some sort of institution cracking down or coming down hard on the normal people. It is literally normal people deciding on the fate of one of their own. And that's actually a really important principle to hold on to. But I think that's the heart of what I would say, regardless of whether you think that the jury trial is perfect, it's not. But we are looking at justice in this day and age where there is a fragile faith in the system. Why is trial by judge a bad idea then?

7:50In this country, we have a long established tradition of jury trial. Some would say it goes back hundreds of years. It's certainly in the modern era, it is the established way in which we in this country decide the guilt of defendants in serious cases in the Crown Court. And I think to take that away is an enormous step. And it should be done because you're going to make things better, because it will improve our standard of justice. But I think what's actually happening is that over years of decline and neglect from political leaders, our courts have got into a really dire state where the buildings are crumbling, the delays are enormous, and people are starting to lose faith in the entire system that it can actually work and function properly.

8:40That's where we are. And that's why these measures are being brought forward by the now Labour government. But I don't think it's in any way policy reform and change that's driven by quality. This is not something to be done because it will make the system inherently better. It's been done purely as an act of desperation because things are falling apart. And that's a really, in my opinion, bad way of making public policy. And it will be forever. This is a moment, if it happens, where we'll basically lose the jury trial in most cases, unless they are, as I said, of the utmost seriousness. And it probably will never come back, Even if the backlogs come down, the delays are cleared, and the system goes back to a level of normality, at that point, the structure and the mechanisms around the criminal courts will have been fundamentally changed and will have lost that principle of jury trial.

9:39Notwithstanding all of the problems that it's got, there are some people who just don't trust judges as well. They have problems. They are under attack. I think that's one way you could describe it. thankfully the the incidence of physical attack are limited but in terms of verbal attacks on social media and questioning their integrity and their existence as a judge to have that authority to take decisions so that's that's the context we're in and the government's proposals as they seem to be would put enormous amounts more power into the hands of judges to how much they are conscientious, diligent, and doing a stand-up job will find themselves being increasingly questioned and the legitimacy of the entire process called to account.

10:30And so that's the check that juries have in the system. If you are a defendant and you put your case before a jury and they go against you, the experience says that that is accepted as a form of justice that people recognise and trust. I tried my best. I put my case. It went against me. And when it's in the hands of a judge, I'm not convinced that you will have that level of compliance, faith and trust in the system. Let's go to an ad break. Coming up, we're asking what value jury trials hold in a justice system which already feels out of reach. We'll see you back here in just a moment.

11:17Welcome back. So Tristan, what do members of the public actually gain by being on a jury? It's important to recognise that in the criminal courts in this country, members of the public don't come and watch. It used to be the case that it was something of a spectator sport, but it's not the case anymore unless you are actually involved in a case or linked particularly to the defendant or one of the witnesses. So general members of the public don't really see what our courts do. There is a level of secrecy and lack of transparency within the system. Sitting on a jury and hearing a trial or two trials is actually, for the majority of the people who do it, is their only interaction with the justice system and with the courts.

12:01I think being on a jury gives you a stake in the system. You can say, I took a decision, I heard the evidence and I made that decision. And, you know, people might come away with stories about how they think the system can be improved. But ultimately, they've had an experience with injustice. They've seen it being done, and they have a more informed opinion about what goes on in a court. Take that away and you are stripping back that level of interaction. So the courts, which I think are already pretty distant from the public, will become even further away and even more closed off in people's minds.

12:42And David Lammy wrote an in-depth review in 2017. What did he say back then? It's unfortunate for David Lammy that he is the Justice Secretary right now. Now, these proposals started under Shibana Mahmood. When she was the Justice Secretary, she's been moved on, obviously. David Lamb has come in as Justice Secretary. I say it's unfortunate because he is now at the helm of an idea to take away jury trials when in 2017, he produced a really fantastic review of the court system and the justice system generally, looking at the way that ethnic minorities are treated by the system. And in his report, he produced a really robust defense of the jury system and the way that trials work for the benefit of everybody.

13:29Particularly, he was looking at the way that the court system avoids bias and prejudice. And the jury system is seen as being a way of guarding against that kind of prejudice. I'm not necessarily saying that a judge is biased and is prejudiced. But when you put the power into the hands of one single person, you do run that risk, the person having preconceived ideas and there being nobody else to act as a check against them, as you would have with a jury debating between 12 very different people sometimes. And even if you have a trial which you could legitimately say is rock solid, no bias, no prejudice, when you focus the power into the hands of one person, you run a serious risk of people assuming prejudice, believing that the system is biased against them.

14:23And that is a dangerous idea that could fire in a way that really damages the integrity of the whole justice system. And so, yes, David Lamy will inevitably, if they push forward with these kind of reforms, have to make arguments which go against what he said some eight years ago, obviously at a time when he was in opposition and writing a pretty forthright report about the system and what needs to be protected and what could be improved. So what exactly worries you about these system changes? Nobody's yet talking about it being temporary. They're talking about it being permanent. I would argue quite strongly that if you need to take away jury trials and if that actually happens, it should be on a very much on a time-limited basis so that perhaps in a couple of years' time, there's a progress report to see if this is actually working, if it's helping to bring down the backlog.

15:22If it is, it might be something that continues for a little while longer. But there comes a point where you can say it worked and we'll go back to the system we have. But unfortunately, we've seen over the last decade or so that once a change is made, then the apparatus of the justice system will be dismantled and you'll never be able to put it back to where it was. So that's where we are with the jury trials. If you start to say we don't need juries, you start to think, well, maybe we could do these trials in smaller rooms. Maybe we can do them in a faster way where we just read the evidence instead of hearing it out loud.

16:00All those things are really, really dangerous ideas, if you ask me, the idea of doing things more efficiently, faster, and therefore more secretively. And that feeds into the idea that we don't trust the system. And so I think that if they're going to do this, and there's a lot of resistance, obviously it'll have to go through Parliament. What there needs to be is a check built into that legislation to say, we will constantly monitor this to make sure that justice is still being done properly. And this is actually still a good idea.

16:38And that's The Standard. For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk. If you'd like to get in touch, please do drop us a line at podcasts at standard.co.uk. we'll be back here on monday morning we'll see you then