Alex Norris, the Lord Chancellor, this week dropped controversial plans to restrict jury trials to cases where the accused faces three years or more in prison. Norris promised to fast-track investment in court technology and judicial resources instead. However, he is keeping proposals to increase magistrates’ sentencing powers, to remove the right to elect a jury trial and to scrap jury trials for technical and lengthy fraud and financial offences. The government said this would free jurors from the burden of lengthy, complex trials.
However, Louise Hodges, partner at Kingsley Napley, warned juror inconvenience was a weak rationale that could apply equally to any other lengthy trial.
Hodges said: ‘Defendants facing the most serious financial allegations—allegations that can destroy careers, reputations and lives—deserve the same right to be judged by their peers as any other defendant.
‘And of course, none of this has anything to do with reducing the backlog. To the contrary, the risk is that this will introduce more complexity and delays with arguments about what exactly is a “technical and lengthy” fraud and financial offence and how to ensure that this provision will be applied consistently and fairly.’
Welcoming the partial reversal on juries, Law Society president Mark Evans said: ‘Too much time has been wasted to reach this common-sense position.
‘Investment in infrastructure and technology is encouraging but this must be new money coming into the criminal justice system. We remain concerned that putting more cases into the magistrates’ court, which also faces record backlogs, without increasing capacity places even greater strain on an already overburdened system and risks serious cases facing summary justice.’
Bar Council chair Kirsty Brimelow KC welcomed ‘the government’s swift action in retaining juries’ but warned it was ‘a dangerous experiment to increase sentencing powers of magistrates and remove the right to elect from defendants at a time when prisons are at capacity and the backlog of cases is accelerating in the magistrates’ courts. The magistrates’ courts are not coping with their caseload’.
