David Lammy’s proposal to abolish trial by jury in all but the most serious cases is wicked and irrational
A wise and noble scholar of jurisprudence once wrote: “Jury trials are a fundamental part of our democratic settlement. Criminal trials without juries are a bad idea.” That was the sage of Tottenham, David Lammy, back in 2020. This week though, out of nowhere, the hapless Lord Chancellor has decided to ignore his own sage advice and announce, with no manifesto pledge to back it, to abolish jury trials for all but the most heinous crimes.
This is such a wicked and irrational idea that it is hard to know where to start in criticising it. So let us start with a potted history of the jury trial. Aeschylus’ great play, The Eumenides, concludes his epic Oresteia with a jury trial. Orestes is judged by a panel of Athenian citizens. The result is a tie, and Athena casts a deciding vote to acquit, establishing “a bulwark for your land and your salvation, such as no other people possesses”.
This sets the precedent that has been followed through to Western history, specifically the history of English-speaking peoples. Dr Alex Burghart MP has pointed out that the “earliest reference to jury trial comes from the third law code of Æthelred the Unready in 997: “Let there be a meeting in each wapentake; and let the 12 senior thegns go out and swear on the relics”.
This was reiterated in magna carta, with the famous line: “No free man shall be … imprisoned … or outlawed … except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” And the tradition has been carried across the Atlantic with the other treasures of their Anglo inheritance, and is enshrined in the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as it is in the other jurisdictions of the Anglosphere.
On the flipside, almost literally every mad, bad and evil regime abolishes juries as one of the first acts of consolidation of tyrannical power. Obviously the Nazis and Bolsheviks did this immediately upon their seizing power. So too the who’s who of dictatorships: the Khmer Rouge, the Chinese Communist Party, Cuba under Castro, Chavez in Venezuela, and Salazar and Franco in Portugal and Spain, as well as Turkey 9 years ago.
This brings us up to the present day, and this wicked new proposal, that has managed to unite everyone from Jeremy Corbyn and the Secret Barrister to the indefatigable Shadow Lord Chancellor Robert Jenrick, and most right-thinking people in between.
There are two major problems with this announcement. The first is the political. This tawdry Labour government jumps when some piddly international tribunal with no actual legal power demands that we get rid of British territory in the Chagos Islands. Likewise they snivel and prostrate themselves before the European Court of Human Rights most mad demands that we keep foreign paedophile rapists here.
But our most sacred ancient liberties? Swept aside without ceremony or mercy. The waffle about “human rights” and their protection by foreign courts smells particularly strongly of the floor of the cowshed when you realise that the precious ECHR does not enshrine the right to a jury trial any more than it allows us to protect our borders.
The stated reasons for doing away with juries are to save costs and cut down on waiting times. These are things that could be solved by appointing competent people to run His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunal Service, putting some more money into the system (it is genuinely one of the few areas which is underfunded), and by having much longer sentences for the sorts of ghastly people who commit hundreds of offences but yoyo in and out of the system.
The second, and substantive, reason why this is such a bad idea is because jury trials fulfil an incredibly important set of roles in our civic life.
This is a system that has been justified by what Edmund Burke calls “the wisdom of the ages”
My friend, the barrister Harry Gillow, put it succinctly to me as thus: “The right to a jury trial is something that exists because we recognise that things can easily go wrong in any trial, and jury trial provides a safeguard for when the jury feel like the result is in some way not fair; twelve random people provide greater security there than a single judge would (recognising that any individual judge may be very different in temperament and attitude to another, with all the possibility for inconsistent results that leads to; a random selection of people — at least in theory — reduces the likelihood of that sort of randomness)”.
This is a system that has been justified by what Edmund Burke calls “the wisdom of the ages”, often guided by what is often called (again by Burke) “the wisdom of unlettered men”. The presumption of innocence until the proving of guilt has taken a beating in recent years, with exhortations to believe people based on their sex or race. But it is nevertheless a fundamental liberty to have the chance to explain yourself before your fellows before being judged. Especially given the threat of false accusations that are made.
As an evil “hanging’s too good for ‘em” right winger, you might expect me to take succour in the likelihood that more people will be found guilty under this new system. I could point to Lee Kuan Yew’s banning of jury trials because the different ethnic groups in Singapore would always vote to acquit their race over others. Or that as a fiscal hawk, I should cheer at the thought of some savings to the public purse.
The price of liberty is one that is worth paying whether in money, or in time
But to quote Team America: World Police; “freedom isn’t free”. The price of liberty is one that is worth paying whether in money, or in time. And this is my last reason to want to defend jury trials. They are one of the last areas where an individual is forced to do something for this nation. There should be more, not less, of this civic participation.
My own two weeks on jury service were painful in some ways, but I knew at least that I was contributing to justice and to the health of my nation. That is not something that can be said of David Lammy.
