The justice minister set out his plan to cut the backlog in pending legal cases before the crown court by reducing the quality of justice on offer on Tuesday, announcing new “swift courts”. Stepping back only slightly on what he soft-launched in the media last week as the abolition of trial by jury in almost all cases, Lammy nevertheless said the government is to go much further than a justice report’s recommendation by placing thousands of suspects in front of a single lawyer wearing at once the hats of judge, jury, and metaphorical executioner.
His opposite number on the Conservative benches, shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick, responded to the change by warning that if it was allowed to go ahead, it would be “the beginning of the end of jury trials” and lambasted the left-wing government for being so solicitous of the rights of illegal migrants while dismissing the ancient rights of Britons as historic curiosities of no relevance.
The Times of London states the move away from jury trials will apply to a huge number of cases which will include people accused of “theft and handling stolen goods, burglary, assault causing actual bodily harm, fraud, dangerous driving and possession of drugs with intent to supply” who would now be denied the chance to be judged by their peers, a centuries-old check on state power. Lammy said because trial by jury had been changed in the past, there could be no objection to further whittling it away now.
Speaking in Parliament on Tuesday afternoon, minister Lammy announced “I will create new swift courts within the crown courts with a judge alone deciding verdicts in triable either-way cases with a likely sentence of three years or less” and claimed these would “deliver justice at least 20 per cent faster than jury trials”. The secretary also said these changes would be “hardwired”, making clear this effort sold on the importance of clearing a criminal justice case backlog is not intended to be temporary.
Making an appeal to internationalism, Lammy called the British system “peculiar” and stated other countries worldwide run their courts differently, as a defence for the changes.
These arguments followed Lammy’s media blitz ahead of his Parliament appearance. Defending his sweeping change as absolutely necessary in the face of an “emergency” which threatens “a total collapse of trust in the justice system”, Lammy had already gone on the attack against critics whose comments he dismissed as the unsurprising dogmatism of nostalgists, who he wrongly accused as having identified no virtue in trial by jury except it being traditional. His opponents would see Britain dragged back to the Victorian era, he intimated.
Lammy wrote in an op-ed published by the Daily Telegraph that “A strong justice system is not one that clings to tradition for its own sake” and said of those opposed to his plan: “Unsurprisingly, the prospect of change draws impassioned debate. Some argue that reform is an attack on the traditions that define our legal system. They reach for Runnymede and Magna Carta, insisting that nothing must disturb the arrangements of centuries past.”
He said: “If [the Magna Carta] authors saw the delays in our courts today, they would not urge us to cling rigidly to tradition. They would demand action.”
The justice minister insisted that, in fact, he commanded a greater understanding of Magna Carta than the critics. He told The Times in interview that while there had been a great deal of attention on article 39 — no free man shall be imprisoned “except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land” — there had not been enough on article 40, that states the government shall not “delay right or justice to anyone”.
Apparently not conceding that the government should actually do both, Lammy placed his emphasis on article 40, arguing that speed of justice is more important than quality. Concerningly, the justice minister offered rhetorical support for his position that treated those going before a court as guilty and therefore not deserving of a jury trial, abandoning another ancient and well-founded basis of good justice.
Lammy told The Times: “Of course it’s right that I reflect on whether someone who has stolen two iPhones from Currys should be heard by a jury or should be heard by a magistrate or in some other way… Because if they’re heard by a jury, that can take two or three days, and that enters the system and will hold up the rape case or the murder case. There are a group of defendants in ‘either-way’ cases who are playing the system, who effectively leave pleading guilty as late as possible.”
In the justice minister’s final exhortation for his critics and the public to to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears, Lammy leant on Vietnam-era apocrypha that sometimes, one must destroy the village in order to save it. He said: “I will not be standing up in parliament… and announcing that we are scrapping jury trials, which remains a fundamental part of our system, and is one of the big contributions that flow out of Magna Carta… This is about saving the jury system.”
Standing to speak against the changes in Parliament on Tuesday, Conservative shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick defended Magna Carta and transposed the particular historic circumstances of its creation onto modern Britain. He said at the dispatch box: “800 years on from the Magna Carta we have another unpopular leader who doesn’t listen to his subjects, levies eye-watering taxes, and a state that locks people up for what they say. I say the link between British citizens and the administration of justice is as important as ever. A link that serves as a check on an occasionally overbearing state. Our ancestors did not stop bad King John only to be done 800 years later by this Prime Minister and his court jester, and all this because the justice secretary can’t manage his own department”.
Abolishing juries is unnecessary because they aren’t what is gumming up the justice system, Jenrick said, noting that even this very day many court rooms stand empty and many court dates are missed. He said: “and why? Not because there are too many juries, but because the justice secretary won’t fund the sitting days.
“Had he done so, the backlog would have shrunk by up to 10,000 cases, while it actually rose this year. The truth is scrapping juries is a choice. This government found the money to bear down on the backlog of asylum claims, it could find the money to spend more on benefits, just not to fund the courts… why does this justice secretary think he has a mandate to rip up centuries of jury trials without even a mention of it in his party’s manifesto? In his twisted logic he says he’s scrapping juries to save them. But be in no doubt, if the justice secretary gets away with this, it’s the beginning of the end of jury trials”.
Continuing on this matter of the government having been able to find considerably more money for asylum seekers in its budget last week but not for opening more courts, Jenrick blasted: “he defends [migrant’s] rights under the ECHR but not [Briton’s] rights under Magna Carta, and for what?”.
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