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.

How the English jury evolved into a modern democratic safeguard

Our jury system didn’t arrive fully formed from ancient Greece. Medieval and early modern England developed a different model, influenced by Norman institutions and local customs. Initially, jurors were often local men selected by sheriffs who might know the case; over centuries, the idea of impartiality strengthened, and statutes standardized selection and eligibility.

• Selection moved from local acquaintance toward random, representative pools.
• Expectations changed: jurors were increasingly seen as neutral fact-finders rather than local adjudicators.
• The modern jury became one of the few places where ordinary people still exercised direct authority over the legal consequences of public policy.

That continuity matters. While the form has changed, the function — embedding citizen judgment within the justice system — remains a unique democratic practice, especially compared with many continental systems that rarely use juries.

Contradictions in current political rhetoric about citizen involvement

Within the Labour movement there are mixed signals about participation. Senior figures have publicly supported citizens’ assemblies — bodies of randomly selected people who deliberate on public policy — as a way to reconnect politics to ordinary lives. Yet proposals to shrink jury trials would diminish another long-standing form of random selection that places citizens at the center of consequential decisions.

If the goal is genuinely to expand meaningful civic engagement, the logic points toward preserving or even strengthening juries rather than curtailing them. Reducing jury trials while praising citizens’ assemblies raises an awkward question: why encourage citizen deliberation in some arenas but curtail it in the courts?

Consider a recent high-profile case in which an individual charged over contentious online speech was acquitted by a jury in less than twenty minutes. The speed and result sparked discussion about whether a bench trial would have produced the same outcome. Where state power is expanding over speech or protest, ordinary jurors can serve as an important brake on prosecutorial or legislative overreach.

[1] The byline says the author is Robert Johnson, but at the bottom of the article the author is named as James Kierstead. Since James Kierstead has written before about sortition and its history, it seems to me likely that he is indeed the author.

Filed under: Juries, Participation, Press, Sortition |