Frightening & Sinister

A sledgehammer to crack a nut. That's how a local magistrate described David Lammy's proposal to scrap jury trials for all but the most serious of offences.

I would go further and say it is a frightening and sinister attack on our civil liberties.

Yes, there is an 80,000 backlog in criminal trials, but juries only decide around 1 per cent of all criminal cases, so scrapping them will have a marginal impact on the backlog.

Furthermore, capacity can easily be increased. It used to be normal for courts to sit on Saturdays, with sessions starting at 9 am and lasting until late evening. Modern court hours are 10.30 to 4.30 with an hour for lunch. A 9.30 to 5.30 day would increase capacity by 40% and including Saturdays would increase it by 68%.

What this is really about is an increasingly authoritarian government determined to impose its will on the masses, preferably without first mentioning its plans in the manifesto.

Above all, the government wants to stop Joe Public from openly criticising or complaining about its actions by imposing draconian sentences on so-called "hate speech". And the government, filled as it is with lawyers, can only trust its mates in the judiciary to do that, not juries.

I've written before about Lucy Connolly, who made the mistake, on her lawyer's advice, of pleading guilty to stirring up racial hatred. This was for a single tweet, which she quickly deleted and apologised for. A judge still handed her a 31-month sentence. 

A more recent case is that of a former Royal Marine, Jamie Michael, who posted a 12-minute video on Facebook urging his followers to protest against illegal immigration. He was careful to stress that they should be polite and must not break the law. He was charged anyway.

It took a jury at Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court all of 17 minutes to acquit him. Hurrah for common sense and for our jury system - what Winston Churchill called the "supreme protection invented by the English people for ordinary individuals against the state".

Michael's barrister, Adam King, said this after his acquittal:

"He would have been much more likely to have been (wrongly) convicted if tried by magistrates or a judge sitting alone. His trial is a prime example of why we need juries - and, perhaps, why this government wants to remove them for cases like his".