Category: Criminal Justice
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Nathan Whetton: Civil Disobedience, Protest and the Jury Trial Reforms
On 2 December 2025, the Lord Chancellor and Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy announced significant reforms to criminal trials in England and Wales. Defending his proposals on the BBC Sunday programme on 4 January 2026, Lammy justified restricting jury trial on the basis of his strong sense of justice, explicitly pointing to the fact he had a photograph…
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Hal McNulty: Forgetting Our Democratic Settlement: Lammy’s Plan to Curb Jury Trials
“I honestly think if I hadn’t had those normal people to basically say, ‘You gotta be joking, no way did this guy do anything wrong’, I’d be finished” (recent defendant Jamie Michael, commenting on his jury acquittal). The Justice Secretary’s proposal to restrict the use of jury trials has been met with furious opposition from all sides. So far,…
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Alex Benn: In Crisis: the ‘Constitutional’ Right to Jury Trial
The ‘Executive Summary’ of the report of Brian Leveson’s Independent Review of the Criminal Courts: Part 1 opens with a description of a crisis. Criminal justice is in crisis. The open caseload in the Crown Court has now reached a record high. As of December 2024, there were over 75,000 outstanding cases in the Crown…