Maintaining Magna Carta

• The government’s plan aims to bring about fair and faster justice for defendants and victims.
• This article proposes using a specialist magistrates’ trial panel to slash the queue to enable faster jury trial for offences above 18 months’ custody.

With its plan to modernise the criminal courts and cut delays, the government’s end game is to reduce the court backlog and enable fair and faster justice for defendants and victims. Many of us desperately want to achieve this by retaining Magna Carta’s ‘judgment by peers’ by using juries and magistrates for all trials, alongside an increased efficiency in using every courtroom, every day. We can do this, but the plan needs to change.

Shortage of magistrates

One of the proposals in the plan is to maintain trial by peers by sitting two lay magistrates with a judge in an intermediate ‘swift court’ for cases between 18 months and 3 years. However, there