Mick Hartley

Letter to the Prime Minister from Chris Moran, who’s resigning from Labour over the jury trial business.

Letter to the Times:

Sir, As retired judges, chairs and former chairs of the Bar and the Criminal Bar Association, we disagree with the replacement of judge and jury trials with judge-only trials for a wide range of offences that attract prison sentences of up to three years, and with the proposal to have cases of dishonesty that might be described as “long and complex” tried by a judge alone. Not because we are reactionaries but because the changes will be unworkable in practice.

The evidence that they will significantly affect the backlog of cases is too thin to support the policy. Victims, witnesses and defendants will still have to wait years, even under the government’s best-case scenario. The experience that juries bring to trials is a better guarantee of fairness to all in a multicultural society than the narrower professional experience of judges. Cutting juries out of the predicted 50 per cent of trials suggests a lack of trust by politicians in the public. We may not have a written constitution but trial by jury is a constitutional matter.

The government wants to rush the Courts and Tribunals Bill through parliament, despite it not having been in Labour’s manifesto and despite inadequate impact assessments. If magistrates are allowed to pass two-year sentences to take more trials from the Crown Court, their existing record backlog of cases will simply grow.