Juries are “a success story of our justice system”, the Justice Secretary David Lammy wrote a few years ago.
“Our jury system may be centuries old,” he added, “but it is still fit for purpose today”.
What a difference a few years, and a new job, make.
Back in 2017, when he wrote these words in the official report on race and the justice system that bears his name, Lammy was a backbench MP on the opposition benches. These days, he is the Justice Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister, with, if reports are to be believed, plans to restrict radically defendants’ access to trial by jury.
To govern is to choose, the saying goes. It is also to leak, and to float ideas, only to disavow them later.
One read of Lammy’s leaked plans is that jury trials will be radically cut from the current 70,000 to 80,000 a year to fewer than 10,000. It is, though, a fool’s game to get too drawn into speculation on shadowy briefings that are light on detail.
The main game in town remains, for now at least, the Independent Review of the Criminal Courts, under the retired senior judge Sir Brian Leveson. The part one report, published earlier this year, also proposed restrictions on jury trials, though ones less far-reaching than the proposals leaked over recent days.
There are good reasons to be sceptical – concerned indeed – about the impact on defendants’ rights – and the principles of justice – of limitations on jury trials. Further restrictions do, though, appear to be on their way: whether in the form envisaged by Leveson, by Lammy’s leaked plans, or something else.
Whatever happens, suggestions that further restrictions would be a dagger to the heart of the justice system are, I think, overblown. In the twelve months to June 2025, over two million criminal prosecutions commenced. Of these, around 76,000, or four per cent, were prosecutions involving a jury.
This is not a good argument for doing away with jury trials. As David Lammy pointed out in his 2017 report, “juries are representative of local populations – and must deliberate as a group, leaving no hiding place for bias or discrimination”.
The vast majority of criminal defendants, however, do not get their day in court with a jury. This has been the case for many years, and nothing Leveson, or Lammy, are proposing will change that.
