Zander’s reflections: the jury system

The late Louis Blom-Cooper was not a fan of trial by jury in criminal cases. In one of the chapters in his Power of Persuasion—Essays by a Very Public Lawyer (Hart, 2015) Blom-Cooper wrote (p185): ‘It is assumed by criminal practitioners that the [jury] system does evoke the public’s confidence. But what evidence do we have for that supposition?’ He thought, ‘impressionistically speaking’, that until the Second World War ‘the British had overwhelming faith in the jury system’ but that, although support was still strong, ‘there is a growing disenchantment with its validity’.

Reading this recently, I went back to the Crown Court Study (1993), which I conducted as a member of the Runciman Royal Commission on Criminal Justice. The Crown Court Study (the Royal Commission’s Research Study No 19) was based on questionnaires completed by the participants in every case completed in every Crown Court in the