Why I love trial by jury

Sitting in the Chamber of the House of Commons this week, listening to ministers defend plans to curtail jury trials, one moment cut through the fog. The policy is sold as a regrettable necessity – a technocratic fix for a court backlog now exceeding 75,000 cases, with some trials pencilled in for 2035. Yet the Justice Minister admitted the truth. Even if the backlog were cleared, she said, the government would press on regardless. That single remark stripped the argument bare. This is not about efficiency or access to justice. It is about ideology. And it is about removing the public from the administration of justice.

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Trial by jury is not a decorative relic of a pre-modern age. It is not a charming constitutional quirk, to be retained or discarded at the convenience of Whitehall. It is one of the most profound expressions of equality before the law that this country has ever devised. To be judged by twelve fellow citizens – none touched by professional assumptions, all required to weigh evidence from first principles – is a safeguard against the concentration of state power that no procedural reform can replace. As Lord Devlin famously observed, trial by jury is “the lamp that shows that freedom lives”. To this government, however, it appears merely an inconvenient antique: slow, untidy, and insufficiently compliant with the managerial spirit of modern justice.

Even on its own terms, the backlog argument collapses under scrutiny. Only around 3 per cent of criminal cases are tried by jury – typically the most serious offences: murder, rape, major fraud. Even if half of these trials were abolished – far more than the government itself predicts – the impact on overall court throughput would be negligible. This is statistical theatre. It will do nothing to dent the vast accumulation of delayed cases, while fundamentally altering how justice is done.

Ministers lean heavily on the Leveson Review, which suggested that juries struggle with complex fraud cases. Yet the evidential basis for this claim is thin. In contrast, the report of Geoffrey Rivlin KC, former Resident Judge of Southwark Crown Court, dismantles the argument with practical experience. In an adversarial system such as ours, he argues, judge-only trials are neither workable nor trusted. They load onto a single individual the full burden of fact-finding, credibility assessment and verdict – decisions that directly determine a person’s liberty. Two judges, presented with identical facts, may reach entirely different conclusions. That is not a theoretical risk; it is a human reality.

The strength of a jury lies precisely in its plurality. Anyone who has done jury service will recognise the process: twelve people test, challenge and refine one another’s views, reaching a collective judgment that commands far greater confidence than the solitary reasoning of a professional, however able. There is also the problem of bias – or the perception of it. In a jury trial, a judge may intervene to correct a charge or ensure vital evidence is considered without fear of appearing partial, precisely because the verdict does not rest with them. In a judge-alone trial, the same interventions will inevitably be read as prejudgment. Add to this the judge’s existing role in ruling on admissibility – from hearsay to bad character evidence – and the separation of functions that underpins a fair trial begins to collapse. When guilt carries the prospect of a long custodial sentence, that separation is not a luxury; it is a necessity.

Remove juries, and what follows is predictable: a surge in appeals, with defendants arguing – often plausibly – that their convictions are unsafe. Far from easing the burden on the courts, this will merely displace it upwards to the Court of Appeal. It is no coincidence that the Diplock courts in Northern Ireland, which dispensed with juries in exceptional circumstances, included an automatic right of appeal. These proposals do not.

As Lord Judge observed in R v Thompson [2010], jury service is demanding and often uncomfortable. It requires citizens to confront deeply sensitive and morally complex human realities. But that is its virtue, not its flaw. Our criminal justice system is plainly under strain. No system is perfect. Yet the jury remains one of the fairest and safest mechanisms we have devised for determining guilt. Above all, it commands public confidence – something in increasingly short supply elsewhere in the criminal justice system.

To dismantle it in the name of efficiency – or ideology – is not reform. It is retreat. And if we value liberty, justice and fairness, it is a retreat we cannot afford.