Lammy to remove Juries for most cases

[Bumblebee72]

It being reported by the Times that Lammy is going to remove the right to choose a jury for all but a few cases. This is a shocking role back of British rights.

And they say we need to worry about Reform........

Anyone who has ever sat on a jury ( me) would surely welcome this. Jurors who miss salient points, let their own prejudices get in the way and let their emotions cloud their decisions ( yes, I heard ‘we know he did it but he’s two years from retirement and he’d lose his pension, so we should overlook it’). And jurors are not accountable for their decisions, so have nothing to lose.

My ILs in Europe are aghast at our system - why wouldn’t we have experts giving verdicts, why would we let lay people do this?

And I’d love to see the introduction of specialist courts for rape and SA like they have in Australia to increase conviction rates.

I think discussing the merits of a jury service is missing the point - they clearly see the benefits of having a jury as they are being retained for trials of the most serious nature , rape, murder -
what concerns me here is that for lesser (but still significant) offences the safeguards and impartiality a jury offers is being dispensed with for convenience and cost cutting, not because it is an improvement on the current system. I’m not happy they are making this move to clear a backlog created by years of underfunding and mismanagement.

Juries have no impact whatsoever on the backlog. It is not juries that caused the backlog. If you can access it there is a very good article quoting the chairwoman of the CBA explaining the real causes of the backlog. The last four trials I did there was one conviction and three acquittals. If the judge alone had dealt with them it would have been four convictions. Judges are largely older, white, male, upper class. Defendants are generally from a total different make up.

If it’s a case that ends up heard by magistrates, you can at least be comforted by the fact they’re not being paid by the crown, they’re doing it for free.

But I can’t believe that any magistrate would ever feel any level of bias because they’ve been appointed by the crown who is also prosecuting. I imagine it could be different for judges who are paid though.

Ive seen a lot of trials, I work within the criminal justice system. I wouldn't want to be tried by a jury.

Opie if you had ever worked in the court system or studied law you would know that juries are very unreliable. A white man is less likely to be convicted compared to a person of color.

Equally, another member of the Jury highlighting this fact demonstrates that Juries consist of multiple individuals for entirely worthwhile reasons, and by and large, they function perfectly well.

What do you do when a single Judge is just a bit bored and wants to piss off to the Golf course?

The last four trials I did there was one conviction and three acquittals. If the judge alone had dealt with them it would have been four convictions.

I'm not sure if that's an argument in favour of juries or judges.

It depends on whether they were guilty or not. No-one wants to see three innocent people go to jail, but three criminals being acquitted isn't ideal either.

Can you post a link to study that found high levels of racism in Judges?

Just as a matter of interest. I am challenging you, or disagreeing.

Just interested.

They'll need a big dead cat for that, the jury thing is a mere kitten.

I can't help but remember the quote

"God will know his own"

Now that I live in a country that doesn't have jury trials, I can see that they really aren't necessary. For serious cases in my country they use a panel of professional judges and lay judges, which are essentially trained jurors, who serve a term of 4 years and have an understanding of the law, which seems far more sensible to me than 12 people who mostly don't know and don't care.

I've sat on a jury and I was a solicitor in a previous life.

In the cases I sat on the judge very carefully directed the jury to the pertinent points of law that they needed to focus on to decide the case - which were then completely ignored. Most people did take the role seriously, but there was an awful lot of talk about feelings and what might have happened rather than actually looking at what was proven. And, yes, one person with a high opinion of themselves did dominate in both cases I sat on.

I'm fine with no juries.
I am not fine with the sex crimes exception.

Think about the average member of the public, would you really want them deciding your fate?

Your fate is not decided by an "average member of the public". A jury is a fairly sizeable number of members of the public, with no particular slant toward how average or otherwise they are.

And yes, I absolutely want them deciding my fate, far more so than any 2 or 3 member "panel" or single individual.

Can just see the next step. Not enough Court rooms, not enough technical staff to record it all or maintain public record, so we'll have "trials" taking place entirely devoid of any sort of public knowledge or scrutiny, with individuals being locked away by State-appointed panels. That's been done before, and it tends not to end well for States who think this is a jolly good way to deal with "miscreants"

Good. A relative was on the jury for a horrific sexual abuse trial. It lasted months and she walked out of the door traumatised and with no support. Let professional trained and supported judge-led inquiry take the place of a system we inherited from the Anglo-Saxons.

Just noting that 89 posts in, and the sum expertise of this thread has still not seen a mention of jury nullification. Which I consider a core principle of English law.

I live in Mexico and we don't have jury trials. What we do have are corrupt judges. One man or woman is much easier to corrupt or intimidate than 12

I don’t recommend juries. They are unpredictable, have bias and there is no IQ test to sit on a jury. Most frustrating experience of my life!

I can’t quite believe what I am reading that people would quite so readily dispense with a bulwark against a police state. But then again people in their cosseted lives don’t think such corruption could happen here- we shall see.

For some starmer could do a dump in their rose garden and they would espouse the benefits of the additional fertiliser….

I’m having to pop out but you can Google it - here is a link to one where the judiciary were quizzed https://documents.manchester.ac.uk/display.aspx?DocID=64125

when I studied law and throughout my career it was recognised that if you were black or from an ethnic minority you had worse outcomes at every single stage of the criminal justice system - so more likely to be arrested, more likely to be imprisoned than a white man who had committed same crime in similar circumstances and most tellingly more likely to receive a harsher sentence.

I think that many victims would agree.

It worries me that only cases ‘likely to result in a conviction’ in many categories ever get to a jury trial in the first place …

I want whatever is best for victims tbh. Not whatever is best for Lammy’s departmental budget.

But justice does need to be speedier and better quality.

So back to the drawing board.

I’m prohibited by bar code of conduct from saying my personal views on cases I’ve acted in. I can say that in my experience juries’ verdicts usually accord with the strength of the evidence and I can usually tell during trial what the verdict will be from how the evidence of witnesses is coming out. My prediction is judges would convict very many more people than juries do. Juries are a safety net.

Somebody did mention it upthread, but they conflated it with repeal of laws so their point was somewhat lost.