The British government has abandoned its controversial plan to strip defendants of their historic right to a jury trial in less serious criminal cases, Justice Secretary Alex Norris announced on Sunday, bowing to sustained pressure from lawyers and politicians who called the proposal an attack on a fundamental liberty.
The U-turn by Prime Minister Andy Burnham — who took office in July — cancels a policy inherited from his predecessor Keir Starmer that would have seen more cases heard by a judge alone in the Crown Court. The plan, designed to clear a mounting backlog of cases, had been one of the most contentious elements of the government’s response to what officials describe as a criminal justice crisis.
Years of waits for victims and defendants
At the heart of the crisis is a Crown Court backlog that reached nearly 81,000 cases awaiting jury trial in England and Wales by the end of June — almost double the figure in 2020. Victims, defendants and witnesses routinely wait years for their cases to be heard.
Starmer’s justice minister, David Lammy, had argued last year that cutting back jury trials would speed up justice. But the proposal provoked a furious backlash from the legal profession, which argued it curtailed the fundamental right of defendants to be tried by a jury of their peers and blamed delays instead on years of neglect and under-investment by successive governments.
The Criminal Bar Association and the Bar Council broadly welcomed the reversal. CBA chair Andrew Thomas thanked ministers for “listening to the evidence and reaching the right verdict”, though he cautioned that a severe threat to trial by jury remained. Bar Council chair Kirsty Brimelow warned that the ministry’s decision to increase sentencing powers for magistrates — who hear minor cases without a jury — could prove counterproductive while backlogs are also rising in magistrates’ courts.
What happens next
The Ministry of Justice confirmed it will keep one related proposal: allowing complex fraud trials, which can run for months, to be heard by a judge alone — an idea that has been debated for years but was rejected by a government-commissioned review earlier this year. The decision lands as hundreds of prisoners were released early to keep prisons from filling up, underlining the scale of the justice system’s problems.
Source: Reuters