The first time I instructed Dick Ferguson QC was when he came over to England during the Troubles. It was a mess of a case in which the only hope was to get the murder charge reduced to one of manslaughter. In his closing speech to the jury he told them what a privileged position they were in, ‘because in Ireland, from where I come’, there was no such thing as a jury, and his client would have been tried by a judge sitting alone.
From that moment, the jury was his. Now, if the former DPP and the lord chancellor have their way, there will be far fewer juries here, at least for those facing a short prison sentence. And if their wish becomes law, the definition of ‘short’ will surely rise.
In my case, the jury were probably right when they returned manslaughter. But the trouble with juries, so far as the establishment is concerned, is that they don’t convict often enough. If they did, we would not have lost the right of trial by jury in some criminal damage, drunken driving and assaulting a police officer cases. We would not have seen the erosion and then abolition of peremptory challenges. We would not have majority verdicts. In most of those instances, there is probably some justification, but the cumulative effect is that the authorities are tilting the scales in their favour. And if they abolish jury trials, they will get the verdicts they want.
Why do defendants abhor trial by magistrates? In large part because they do not trust lay magistrates, and in many cases think there is no point in coming up for trial before certain stipendiaries (district judges). It is idle to pretend otherwise. Is there any good reason to think the swath of judges who will have to be appointed will be very different? They will have their own sets of biases. At present, at least there is an appeal to the Crown court.
One can read in Lammy’s proposal a symbolic crusade to abolish juries altogether. If this succeeds, the result will be a total distrust of the criminal justice system – and another crack in the social fabric. It must not happen.
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