On Jury Trials

Have you ever heard of a grand jury? If you live in the UK, chances are you’ve only ever heard them mentioned in American TV shows, but they were once a major part of our shared legal system.

It is now 93 years since the last grand jury was called in the United Kingdom and its powers were transferred to magistrates. At the time, papers wrote of the end of English liberties, Magna Carta (a document which solely conferred rights on 13th Century Norman barons and no one else), and how the UK would now fall to tyranny. Surprisingly for some, liberal democracy didn’t come to an end, but the process of bringing cases to trial were significantly sped up.

Grand juries were the original type of jury in the UK, held not to determine guilt, but in some ways more importantly, existed to determine whether in the eyes of the public an offence had been committed in the first place. They played a useful role for a time, that time went, and no one now gives them much thought.

The proposal to restrict trial by either way offences solely to the Magistrates Court is a much less radical proposal. Such cases are already heard by Magistrates without anyone claiming such these courts fail to provide justice. The only change is that where two people have both committed the same offence under the same circumstances, they won’t now be going to two different types of court based on personal preferences.

Juries will continue to exist and hear the same serious offences that have always been restricted to jury trial, only now these courts will be able to hear these most serious cases quicker due to the capacity released by sending trial by either way offences to magistrates courts.

This proposal did not come as a surprise to me. Talking to people in the sector it was the only idea which seemed to offer a realistic chance of clearing the court backlog and I’d already raised it directly with the Justice team some months before the policy was announced.

Why do I support the change? I am tired of meeting with constituents who have been victims of some of the most serious offences imaginable and who after years are still trying to get their day in court. At the same time, it cannot be right that their perpetrator is walking free and able to create new victims every day. It’s not right, particularly when we know there is a simple fix.

Maybe there are some who still mourn grand juries, although I suspect their numbers of vanishingly small, but we now know that the day they were replaced with magistrates wasn’t, in fact, the day that liberty died. Today won’t be either, but with these changes, finally, we should be able to give victims the justice they deserve.