A former solicitor general has annihilated David Lammy’s plans to scrap juries in a number of court cases on GB News, further burdening the Deputy Prime Minister with a damning verdict.
The Lord Chancellor has been battered with criticism by his own judiciary after a leaked memo revealed new proposals to reform the system, binning off juries for sentences less than five years but keeping the system for more serious offences, such as murder, manslaughter and rape.
Joining GB News host Dawn Neesom, former solicitor general for England and Wales Robert Courts KC slammed Mr Lammy’s proposal to scrap juries.
“I’m not in favour of it at all. It’s a terrible idea. It would be an appalling loss for liberty, too, to lose jury trials who’ve been with us for the best part of a thousand years,” he blasted.
“And they work. It’s the absolute cornerstone of political freedom. The simple reason that nobody can make a jury do anything. You can lean on a jury if you wish.
“As Government, they can still acquit. And that’s we’ve seen that hundreds of times over the course of English history.
“So it would be an awful loss from which our political freedom and our judicial system wouldn’t recover.”
“It would be a massive loss, but it won’t solve the problem, which is backlogs. And there is a huge backlog problem. There’s no two ways about that,” Mr Courts blasted. “But getting rid of jury trials will not assist.”
The proposals have been blasted by leading experts since they were leaked last week
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Even with the plans proposing to axe juries for the “most serious” crimes, Mr Courts insisted that “the vast majority of jury trials would still see the loss there”.
“Juries have to be free from the judicial system, liberty must be independent of politicians. And you can take a democratic process and change the law if you wish to matter altogether.
“But the judicial system must be free of political interference. But much more likely to be the case with a jury.”
The Ministry of Justice has claimed that such reforms would accelerate the quest to justice and protect victims from “years of torment and delay”.
The Justice Secretary’s proposals have received rampant retaliation from Britain’s leading lawyers
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As it stands, there are almost 80,000 cases waiting to be heard in crown courts.
And Mr Courts is not the only staunch critic, with Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick calling on Mr Lammy to “pull his finger out” to cut the backlog instead of “depriving British citizens of ancient liberties”.
“There is a massive backlog. No two ways about that. And it’s quite right that justice delayed is justice denied. That’s not just an empty judicial or legal saying. It really means something. It’s appalling,” Mr Courts fumed.
“Or witnesses who often then don’t give evidence to be waiting for years. It’s appalling as well for those who are facing trials and that has to be cut. But there are many other problems in what is a complicated system.”
Mr Courts, as well as a number of other leading experts, has claimed that juries were not behind the seemingly insurmountable court backlog.
Instead, a shortage of criminal barristers were “one of the biggest problems” behind the queue.
Prof Cheryl Thomas KC of University College London told the Observer: “It’s not the jury system that’s responsible for the backlog. It’s 20 years of disinvestment in the criminal justice system across the board.
“We’re not just talking about courts, talking about police, the Crown Prosecution Service, prisons and probation.”
Instead, Mr Courts advised taking on a different task: reforming the justice system in its entirety.
“It means ultimately more money going into it so that you can increase the pay and make it more attractive to be a criminal lawyer,” he explained.
“They’re not very well paid, in contrast to many civil lawyers,” he added, admitting that his argument appeared “counter-intuitive”.
Additionally, Mr Courts finally took aim at Labour for making such changes to the justice system when it “certainly wasn’t in their manifesto”.
“A party manifesto often doesn’t contain everything, and it tends to be in fairly broad terms rather than detail. But for major constitutional change, you absolutely need a mandate for a change of this nature,” he declared.