Juries are an archaic and inefficient feature of Britain’s collapsing justice system. They survive only in some English-speaking countries as quaint relics of medieval jurisprudence. They deserve dispatch to the world of ducking, flogging, drawing and quartering.
As it is, criminal courts have built up a hopeless backlog in England and Wales of almost 80,000 cases, with some hearings postponed to 2029. A surge in rape cases has led to a two-year delay, with twice the number of complainants withdrawing as five years ago. Britain’s prison population threatens to break the 100,000 barrier, or twice its size in the 1990s. These are not just convicts. A fifth of cells contain remand prisoners spending months awaiting trial. This is a parody of justice.
The justice secretary, David Lammy, knows it cannot go on. He proposes that juries be confined to extreme crimes, such as rape, manslaughter and murder, with the rest defaulting to a single judge. This year, the Leveson review of the criminal courts warned of a “total system collapse”. Brian Leveson, a former judge, proposed most trials go before a judge with two magistrates in attendance. In the jury-loving US, a similar crisis has led to 98% of criminal cases now being settled informally, in out-of-court negotiations with prosecutors. This is hardly justice seen to be done.
Almost no other European country uses juries, except sometimes in exceptional cases. Most use judges and examining magistrates. They treat trials as matters of possibly contested evidence, most often a matter for scientific expertise and discussion. Dramatised rituals are the preserve of Britain’s justice system.
British juries have already been abandoned for civil trials – curiously so, as in matters of libel public opinion could be of some relevance. They have also been discontinued for financial trials, which frequently went far over the heads of “12 good citizens and true”. Meanwhile, most people seem unaware that the overwhelming majority of criminal cases are conducted in magistrates courts, already without juries. Even among cases that go to crown courts, only one in five are now decided by juries. Yet they occupy a ludicrous amount of time and bureaucracy.
I have done jury service on three occasions and have never seen such a waste of time and money. What should take two or three hours would take two or three days. Two of our cases involved nothing more serious than grievous bodily harm, and one was a fraud that few of us understood. None needed a jury. All we knew was that a guilty verdict leading to a jail sentence would be grotesque. Going to prison is not a matter of months. For most people, its consequence is a sentence for life.
In the courts, we heard arguments of extreme guilt against extreme innocence. There was little discussion of mitigation, previous records or background circumstances. Barristers often seemed ill-briefed, while solicitors sat silent, sometimes with their heads in their hands. This division of Britain’s legal profession between solicitors and barristers is as costly and archaic as are juries.
The only people who love juries are barristers, fiercely defending them in the media. This is understandable, as juries are their audience and their bread and butter. Many crooks also like them because they believe juries are lenient, and it may be that in some cases a jury is more lenient than a judge. When I was recently prosecuted for driving too often over 20mph, I would love to have pleaded my case before a jury.
The reality is that Britain ends up sending far more people to prison than countries without juries. England and Wales imprisons 145 of its citizens for every 100,000. Jury-free Germany imprisons 71, the Netherlands and Norway just 54. I do not believe that Britons are twice as criminal as Germans, or three times as Dutch or Norwegians. The jury-loving US imprisons 541.
British crime and punishment is prison-obsessed. Not a week passes without some MP demanding long sentences for everyone from hate speakers to water board chairs. Jurisprudence is stuck in a rut and hostile to new ideas. Crime is seen not as a societal disease, requiring professional analysis and cure. There seems no scope for restorative justice or the role of rehabilitation in sentencing, as there is in Scandinavia. Discussion is over retribution and deterrence – a deterrence that is patently ineffective in areas such as cybercrime and sexual violence.
The legal profession is lobbying frantically to keep its place on stage. It accuses opponents of wanting “to go back to the star chamber”. Anyone who says that should be compelled to spend a week studying justice in Norway – and join the 21st century. Now push has come to shove. The British system is broken. Justice is being denied. A professional freemasonry cannot stand in the way of reform.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
