For the sake of justice, something has to give. Everyone knows that the courts are in crisis, that we can’t go on like this. Traumatised victims can’t keep being told that the earliest available date for a trial is 2029, so they’re either going to have to live with it hanging over them for another four years or drop out. (And nor can defendants put their lives endlessly on hold, worrying that witnesses’ memories will only fade with time.) Something obviously needs to change. But the idea that the only solution is to scrap jury trials in all but the most serious cases of rape, murder and other offences with sentences longer than five years – as a leaked letter from the justice secretary, David Lammy, suggests will happen in England and Wales – should ring alarm bells nonetheless.
Anyone who has sat in a courtroom for long enough, never mind on a jury, will know that it isn’t exactly 12 Angry Men out there. Members of the public obliged to dispense amateur justice have the same flaws, limitations and tendency to fall asleep in the boring bits – or, as on one memorable occasion at the Old Bailey, repeatedly ask if the hot witness is single – as the rest of us, and unlike judges they aren’t obliged to give their reasons for sometimes baffling decisions. Juries are notoriously resistant to convicting in all but the most straightforward rape trials, and expert doubts raised over Lucy Letby’s murder conviction make a strong case for removing them from cases with very complex medical evidence. All that said, however, they’re absolutely vital to justice being seen to be done.
