In defence of jury trials

DK Renton argues that David Lammy’s proposal to severely cut the number of jury trials is another authoritarian step by Labour.

Do you remember the Elbit Two? Supporters of Palestine Action, they admitted occupying for six days the roof of a factory manufacturing drones. They damaged a skylight to reveal a drone inside the factory and sprayed the building in red paint. Elbit claimed that the action caused them loss, extra security amounting to £40,000 per month, or £1.6 million by the trial. The Crown prosecuted the defendants for criminal damage. In May 2024, a jury at Leicester Crown Court acquitted them. 

How about the HSBC Nine? They were supporters of Extinction Rebellion, who were tried in November 2023 for breaking the windows of a building owned by HSBC, Europe’s second largest investor in fossil fuels. They accepted causing damage to the bank’s property; HSBC put the bill of their protest at £500,000. A jury at Southwark Crown Court acquitted them. 

What about the Coulston Four? They admitted causing damage to the statue of the slaver. In January 2022, a jury at Bristol Crown Court acquitted them. Once again, juries ignored judges pushing for a conviction, and insisted on seeing the case through the protesters’ eyes.

Protesters need juries to survive. Over the last five years, there’s been a sharp turn to the right in the court system. The senior judges buckled under pressure from the Conservatives, then have put themselves at the front of the attack on protest rights.

Newspapers do tell us, rightly, that Parliament has passed anti-protest laws, and both main parties have supported them. The media find it much harder to explain that judges have gone further than the politicians by removing defences of necessity and breach of human rights. Now, when campaigners try to tell juries why they protested, judges silence them, sometimes even jailing them when the accused insist on explaining their actions.

Judges have passed sentences so harsh that the UN special rapporteur Michel Forst said that the way Britain treats protesters is ‘not acceptable in a democracy’.

Since Covid-19, the courts have become much slower at processing court cases, and there are more than 75,000 cases waiting to be decided by the Crown Court. Around 20,000 cases have been in the system for a year or more. Leaving cases in the system unprocessed is a disgrace, and a source of particular distress for the victims of interpersonal crimes. 

Right-wing politicians and senior judges are using this as an excuse to remove juries. Over the summer, one judge Brian Leveson suggested that complex fraud cases be reserved to judges, and that some “either way” offences (in practice, those where the sentences could not be more than six months) would be passed to a new court made up of a judge and two non-lawyer magistrates. In his proposals, crown court cases could be heard by a judge alone – but only if a defendant agreed. 

Labour’s David Lammy wants to go even further. He says that all cases carrying a sentence of less than five years should be given to judges, who would hear them alone. 

If you take these arguments on their own terms, their weakness is that they never explain why fewer jurors would reduce waiting times. The reason for the backlog is simple. Justice budgets have been cut year-on-year since 2010. Court buildings are workplaces too, and suffer from the same problems as the rest of the public sector. Cases are cancelled at the last minute. They go to the back of the queue, and you can’t fit in other hearings in their place.

Here are some of the reasons they are cancelled: the private companies routinely forget to deliver defendants from prison; those companies are shoddily run, and face no penalties for failure. Courts forget to book interpreters; they are as badly paid and court staff demoralised. Witnesses aren’t properly told to attend trial. The Crown Prosecution Service suffers particularly badly from under-resourcing; it routinely fails to produce essential papers for trial on time or at all. The database on which trials are recorded breaks down. Court buildings are crumbling, the plumbing fails or lifts needed to convey disabled witnesses collapse. Barristers are disaffected after years of low pay and many have checked out of the system, not making themselves available for trial. Compared to all these factors, a lack of available jurors is irrelevant, it is not one of the reasons causing trials to collapse. 

This government refuses to do anything to address the problems. Running a legal system costs money and politicians have chosen other priorities. That is no good reason to abolish juries. Rather, they are the last part of the law to resist the general drift into authoritarianism.