Equality by lot

The UK government is aiming to reduce the use of trial juries in the UK, claiming this is useful in order to “modernise the criminal courts” and “save victims from pain and anguish of delays”. Under the proposal “cases with a likely sentence of three years or less heard by a Judge alone – estimated to take 20% less time than a jury trial”.

James Kierstead¹, writing in The Valley Vanguard, makes several good points regarding juries and the attempt to reduce their purview, highlighting the hypocrisy and manipulation behind the government’s claims.

Labour’s attack on jury trials threatens democracy

Last month I sat in the audience at an event called In Defence of Trial by Jury, where lawyers, academics and campaigners pushed back against proposals from UK justice secretary David Lammy to shift more Crown Court cases away from juries. The conversation felt urgent: it wasn’t merely about court logistics, but about who gets to decide the most serious questions in our public life.

Speakers challenged the notion that juries are the primary cause of the Crown Court backlog — currently close to 78,000 cases — and instead pointed to chronic underfunding, procedural complexity and an increasing volume of marginal claims. But beyond efficiency, the debate opened up a deeper tension over civil liberties and democratic participation that deserves closer scrutiny.

Jury trials as a check on state power and a civic practice

Defenders of juries often emphasize civil liberties: the idea that a defendant should be judged by peers rather than by the state’s appointed officials. This is vital when criminal statutes are broad or politically charged. Recent prosecutions for online speech about immigration illustrate the point — juries sometimes act as a restraint on overreach.

Still, the importance of juries goes beyond protecting the accused from coercion. They are a rare, enduring mechanism for civic participation in institutions that are otherwise dominated by professionals and elites. Removing juries reduces the channels through which citizens practice deliberation and exercise collective judgment.

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