Georgia L Gilholy: Robert Jenrick is right. We must protect our right to trial by jury  

Georgia L Gilholy is a journalist.

The government commissioned the independent review into the UK’s “broken” justice system is hot off the press, and guess what?

It warns that some jury-free trials must be permitted to avert a system “collapse”.

Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick is leading the charge against this push, warning MPs on Wednesday that it was a “slippery slope” to abandoning jury trials altogether. The erstwhile Tory leadership candidate demanded that his Government Counterpart Sarah Sackman answer whether she accepted “that scrapping jury trials is a disgraceful and unnecessary rejection of one of our country’s proudest and most ancient liberties?” The minister dodged the question and simply aired grievances about her Conservative predecessor.

The retired judge who headed this worrying review, Sir Brian Leveson, has spent years suggesting the right to trial by jury might be negotiable. In his 2015 “Review of Efficiency in Criminal Proceedings”, Sir Brian said that the right to a jury trial should be removed in some cases to enhance “efficiency”. If his advice is heeded, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) will create new “intermediate” courts in which judges will try defendants previously entitled to a trial by a jury.

Trial by jury is not a trivial quirk that can be rotated on and off the agreed-upon list of “Very British Things” alongside Paddington Bear and queuing. This principle is a crucial one in English common law, which took hundreds of years to cement into our nation’s constitution and consciousness.

Still, we must not downplay the urgent issue of the backlog of Crown Court cases yet to be heard. A whopping 750 cases are clocking up every month, and the backlog is projected to surpass 100,000 cases by 2028. But the right to be judged by a jury of our peers is among our most precious entitlements. Jenrick is correct that, regardless of our crises,  this should not be up for debate.

There are plenty of other things Labour could do without taking a hammer to a cornerstone of the justice system. Last September the MoJ told The Times that Crown Court sitting days would be capped at 105,000 days in the upcoming year. This March the government said it would oversee an uptick of 110,000 sitting days in 2025–26. However, this came months after Lady Chief Justice Baroness Carr stressed that our Crown Courts could sit for at least 113,000 days, and the Bar Council warned of “damaging” results if the cap was not lifted. It is simply not good enough.

The government must also see fit to attack the root causes of the case backlog. Firstly, this

would require them to tackle spiralling crime. But Sir Brian’s review also suggests lighter sentencing in some criminal cases, something which would, while slimming down our bulging prison populations, would likely encourage yet further crime and disorder. We also need better legal aid funding and more lawyers. These issues are complex and costly, but solving them will genuinely relieve pressure on the courts, without forcing the public to suffer the turmoil of a justice system failing at its sole mission: to render to each his or her due.

Scrapping juries in particular cases for the sake of slimming down a temporary case backlog, would figure as a mighty act of national self-harm in future history books.  In the U.S., plea bargaining disincentivises full jury trials, and is used in some 90 per cent of cases. Many defence lawyers, facing resource constraints and punitive sentencing risks, advise clients to plead guilty—even when doubts about guilt remain—simply to avoid harsher penalties at trial. Under such circumstances, a jury trial often becomes the preserve of wealthy defendants willing to shell out on pricey attorneys. Do we really want justice to become a preserve of the wealthy?

In 1215 Magna Carta formalised the principle that no English subject could be punished if “the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land” had not first been given. This foundational principle has given rise to a jury system alien to the often tyrannical inquisitorial processes that arose on the Continent. Under these systems, state-picked judges actively investigate and rule on cases.

Our age-old culture of juries has helped keep our Crown and its ministers in check. Even our monarchs have been prosecuted. Instead of a sole, possibly partisan person being given authority over a defendant’s fate, a randomly selected group of citizens bring their approach to bear on the facts of a given case. This freedom makes for a justice system worthy of its name, and watering it down would surely damage any remaining trust in the law at a time when the State stands accused of a “two-tiered” approach.

Eliminating juries under the guise of efficiency would only benefit one institution: the State. As Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens has long warned, one of the first things totalitarians do when entering power is to forbid juries, as both the Nazis and the Soviets did. The right to a trial by one’s peers is just as important as more PR-friendly principles such as freedom of expression or belief.

If it so chooses, Labour could quickly overturn what over a thousand years of history forged. But what might be speedily destroyed will not be so easy to restore. Perhaps Sir Keir Starmer should take heed of Robert Bolt’s fictionalised Saint Thomas More’s words, when he was faced with authorities willing to disregard ancient safeguards to expand their own power: “I’d sooner give the devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake”.

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