BBCThe government is set to announce plans to restrict the right to jury trials in England and Wales in an effort to address unprecedented backlogs and delays in justice.
Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary David Lammy will table the motion in Parliament later on Tuesday.
Last week his final “decision”, contained in a document circulated around the government, was leaked to the BBC and The Times.
It is unclear whether the plan – which would abolish jury trials except in most serious cases, including murder – has been approved by the cabinet or walked back.
Proposals to cut jury trials are based on recommendations from a senior retired judge, who advised ministers the reform would help tackle delays.
There are currently 78,000 cases waiting to be completed in the Crown Court. In practice, this means that some suspects being charged with serious crimes today may not go to trial until the late 2029s or early 2030s. Officials estimate the number of cases will exceed 100,000 before then unless further action is taken.
A leaked internal government briefing last week revealed that the Justice Ministry has finalized plans to create new forms of jury-less trials, where cases would be decided by a judge alone. Jury trials will therefore end for most crimes currently before the Crown Court – including theft, most drugs, violent and sexual crimes and fraud.
Cases will definitely go before a jury only if the defendant faces a possibility of more than five years in prison or is charged with murder, manslaughter or rape.
Volunteer magistrates – who handle most criminal cases in lower courts – will see their sentencing powers doubled to two years.
The leaked plan does not apply to Scotland or Northern Ireland and was circulated to other departments before final Cabinet sign-off. It also follows recommendations from retired Appeal Court judge Sir Brian Leveson earlier this year.
Speaking ahead of the announcement in Parliament, Lammy declined to confirm the final package, but said there would be an extra £550m over three years for specialist victim support services – and £34m aimed at attracting more barristers into criminal work.
“Juries are and always will be a fundamental part of our justice system and play a very important role in verdicts,” he said.
“(If) someone steals an iPhone from an electrical store tomorrow – is it right that that person should be able to select a jury?
“That case will stay in the system, take two or three days in court, and so rape, murder, more serious crimes will be delayed.
“In every decision we make, we are committed to putting victims at the center of the system and balancing those victims against the process.”
But Criminal Bar Association president Riel Carmi-Jones Casey said it was not the juries that caused the unprecedented delays – but the years of shortages.
He said, “It is counter-intuitive to impose an untested, untested layer of complexity and cost in the form of any new division of the Crown Court on our desperately underfunded system with its crumbling infrastructure.”
Many criminal barristers blame the previous Conservative government for the backlog – saying the courts have been starved of resources for more than a decade.
Robert Jenrick MP, the shadow justice secretary, said David Lammy had defended grand juries in the past – and accused him of abandoning his principles.
“Labor has chosen to spend billions of extra pounds on benefit payments rather than fund the courts to reduce the backlog,” he said.
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