The birthplace of the jury system is reducing jury trials. Do jurors slow down justice?
England and Wales is planning to remove the right to a jury trial for offenses carrying a prison sentence of less than three years in an effort to reduce court case waiting times.
LONDON — The right to a trial by a jury of peers traces its roots back to medieval England and has helped spawn similar systems in the United States, Canada and elsewhere.
But in the country where the idea was first conceived in 1215, there are moves to pare back jury trials.
David Lammy, the U.K.’s deputy prime minister and justice secretary, has announced plans to scrap jury trials for offenses that carry a likely prison term of less than three years. Judges, barristers and lawmakers have spoken out against the move.
The reforms, Lammy told Parliament, would help cut the backlog of cases waiting for trial in England and Wales, which currently stands at 78,000. Defendants are currently being offered court hearing dates for 2029.
Ursula Smartt, associate professor in law at Northeastern University in London, said England and Wales appear to be moving towards a “continental criminal justice system”, where it is more common for a single or panel of judges to decide a defendant’s guilt.
In Germany, the concept of having a trial decided by a judge has “never been an issue”, Smartt said. Berlin abolished jury trials in 1924. Verdicts in the Netherlands are handed down by professional judges and only the most serious of cases are heard by jurors in France.
Even in the U.S., a defendant can waive their constitutional right to a jury trial. According to the Legal Information Institute, a trial can proceed without a jury in a federal district court as long as the court and prosecutor agree and where the defendant does so “knowingly and voluntarily”.
Smartt said Lammy’s proposed reforms have the potential to speed-up the justice process by preventing defendants from pleading “not guilty” in the knowledge that, for more minor offenses, they are likely to spend months, if not years, out on bail.
In England and Wales criminal law, there is a category known as “either way” offenses, which includes charges such as actual bodily harm or burglary. In such instances, the defendant can choose to either have their case heard by a lower court, where the case will be presided over by lay judges called magistrates or a single district judge, or be tried in front of a judge and jury.
The U.K. government’s reforms will remove a defendant’s right to elect for a jury trial for either-way offenses. Their case will instead be sent to a so-called “swift court”, to be heard by a single judge.
Lammy accused defendants in either-way cases of choosing jury trials to “bide their time” in the hope that a charge is eventually dropped.
Smartt has first-hand knowledge of how the delay tactic can work, having sat as a magistrate for 20 years. She recalls being in court and watching defendants being advised by their lawyer to hold out for a jury trial.
“By the time they finally get to crown court, they might have been out on bail for as long as four years, possibly continuing to offend,” said Smartt. “And then when they finally get to their first hearing, they will plead guilty.”
An independent review of the criminal courts commissioned by the U.K.’s Ministry of Justice reported that “swift courts” would deliver justice at least 20% faster than jury trials.
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There are about 1.3 million prosecutions in England and Wales annually and 3% of those result in a trial. Lammy said his changes, which includes removing juries from complex fraud cases, will reduce the number of jury trials by a quarter. Magistrate’s courts, which currently hear 90% of criminal cases, will be given extended sentencing powers, allowing them to deal with more offenses.
The proposed overhaul has not been well received by barristers or even by lawmakers in the governing Labour Party. Karl Turner MP, a former barrister, wrote on X that it was “complete and utter crap” to suggest jury trials had led to long waiting times for criminal trials.
Balgiisa Ahmed, an assistant professor in law at Northeastern in London, said there was “no convincing evidence” that replacing juries with judges would significantly reduce delays.
Cuts to budgets in the public legal and justice sectors have been a central cause of the ballooning backlog, Ahmed argued, even before COVID-19 exacerbated the wait for trials. “Jury trials take longer because they provide strong procedural protections, not because they are inefficient,” she said.
Tyrone Steele, deputy legal director at Justice, a U.K.-based law reform charity, said the public should be “deeply concerned” about a proposal which he described as seeking to remove “our final safeguard and check against state overreach”.
“I think it’s a pretty fundamental shift,” Steele said of Lammy’s reforms. “What it really means at its heart is that you’re taking ordinary people and removing them from large swathes of the criminal justice system and from some of the most important cases.”
Ahmed noted statistics from a review in 2017 that Lammy carried out into racial equality in the justice system while he was in opposition. He found, continued Ahmed, that juries “narrow, rather than exacerbate, racial disparities”. Steele said public polling consistently showed that juries are “one of the most, if not the most, trusted parts of the justice system” due to their representative make-up.
Ahmed said countries that forgo juries had traditionally developed “entirely different institutional ecosystems”, with strong protections in place in regard to their judge-led systems. In contrast, Ahmed added, England and Wales are instead attempting to limit their use in a jury-centric system.
“If we dismantle a centuries-old safeguard without addressing real capacity problems, we risk weakening due process, exacerbating inequality, and creating instability rather than efficiency,” said Ahmed. “Pace should never come at the expense of justice.”
