The Government has confirmed its intention to remove the right to trial by jury from the great majority of cases currently heard in the Crown Court. Under the proposals advanced by the Lord Chancellor, David Lammy, a wide category of offences—many carrying custodial sentences of up to three years—will be tried by a judge sitting alone. The judge will determine the law, assess the facts, decide guilt or innocence, and pass sentence. The jury, where it survives at all, will become an exceptional rather than a normal feature of serious criminal justice.

This proposal is presented as a reluctant concession to necessity. The criminal courts, we are told, are paralysed by delay. Victims wait years for closure. Defendants wait years under the shadow of accusation. Witnesses disengage. The backlog grows. Jury trials are said to be slow, cumbersome, and expensive. If justice is to be delivered at all, something must give—and the something, it seems, is a constitutional safeguard that predates almost every institution now entrusted with administering justice.

It is difficult to overstate the seriousness of this proposal. It does not amount to a marginal reform, nor to a technical adjustment. It is a reconfiguration of the criminal justice system at its core. It alters the relationship between the citizen and the State, between accusation and judgment, and between law as command and law as consent. It does so not in response to any demonstrated failure of juries as arbiters of fact, but in response to administrative collapse elsewhere in the system.

Trial by jury is not an ornamental tradition, nor a cultural artefact preserved out of sentiment. It is a constitutional principle that emerged from a specific historical anxiety: the fear of unchecked authority. Its origins lie in the medieval struggle to restrain royal power, most famously associated with the reign of King John and the settlement commonly known as Magna Carta. Whatever disputes exist among historians about precise meanings or later accretions, there has never been serious doubt that judgment by one’s peers was understood, even in the thirteenth century, as a barrier against arbitrary punishment imposed from above.

What matters, however, is not the age of the institution but its function. Trial by jury compels the State to justify its coercive power before a body of ordinary citizens who are not professionally invested in the machinery of prosecution. Jurors are not part of the executive. They are not promoted by compliance, nor disciplined for dissent. They are not trained to regard conviction as success, nor acquittal as failure. They are summoned temporarily and then returned to private life.

This structural independence is not accidental. It is the reason juries exist at all. A criminal trial is not merely an exercise in fact-finding. It is a moral judgment carried out in the name of the community. To remove that judgment from the community and vest it entirely in salaried officials is to alter the character of criminal law itself.

The independence of the jury is not limited to weighing evidence. It extends to the power to acquit even where the evidence appears overwhelming. This principle was established decisively in Bushell’s Case in 1670, which made clear that jurors could not be punished for their verdicts. A jury may return a verdict according to conscience, even where it conflicts with the judge’s view of the law or the facts.

This is often described, usually with disapproval, as “jury nullification.” The term is misleading. A jury does not nullify the law. It refuses to enforce it in a particular case. That refusal is not a flaw in the system. It is a deliberate safeguard. It exists to prevent the criminal law from becoming a purely mechanical instrument of power, detached from common sense, proportionality, and justice as ordinarily understood.

A system without juries removes this safety valve entirely. Judges may be conscientious and fair-minded, but they are also institutional actors. They are appointed by the State, promoted by the State, and embedded within a professional culture that necessarily internalises official priorities. That is not a moral criticism. It is a description of how institutions function. The presence of a jury forces the State to persuade, not merely to assert. It imposes a burden of justification that goes beyond technical legality. That burden is precisely what the present proposals seek to remove.

There is no denying that the criminal justice system is in crisis. Delays are endemic. Cases drift. Trials collapse. Confidence erodes. But to identify jury trial as the cause of this crisis is to mistake symptom for disease.

The backlog in the Crown Court is not the result of jurors taking too long to deliberate. It is the cumulative effect of systemic administrative failure across the entire criminal process. Prosecution agencies fail to keep track of witnesses. Contractors fail to produce defendants. Interpreters are not booked or do not attend. Digital systems crash or freeze. Disclosure is late or incomplete. Police investigations stall for months awaiting forensic or digital analysis. Court buildings decay to the point of unusability.

These failures are not rare or exceptional. They are routine. They waste vast amounts of court time. They cause adjournments, aborted trials, and repeated hearings that serve no purpose other than to manage dysfunction. None of this has anything to do with juries.

Indeed, if the Government were serious about addressing delay, it would begin by repairing these failures. It would invest in administration, infrastructure, and personnel. It would enforce compliance with court directions. It would penalise persistent incompetence. It would rationalise procedures that generate unnecessary hearings.

Instead, it has chosen to abolish a constitutional safeguard because it is easier than reforming the institutions that have failed. That choice reveals priorities.

The justification most frequently offered for reducing jury trials is cost. Jury trials are said to be expensive. They require longer hearings, more preparation, and more courtroom time. Judge-only trials are presented as faster and cheaper.

This argument deserves scrutiny. Justice is not a commercial service whose value can be measured solely by throughput. Criminal law authorises the deprivation of liberty, property, and reputation. It is precisely in such matters that procedural safeguards are most necessary.

To treat jury trial as a dispensable expense is to adopt the logic of the managed state: outcomes matter; processes do not. That logic is seductive. It promises speed and predictability. But it does so by reducing justice to administration.

Once cost becomes the decisive criterion, there is no principled limit to what may be sacrificed. Today it is the jury. Tomorrow it may be open trials, public reasons, or the presumption of innocence. Each safeguard, viewed in isolation, appears inefficient. Taken together, they are what distinguish law from command.

If the objective is to preserve liberty while restoring functionality, the correct direction of reform is not to abolish jury trial, but to reduce the scope of criminal law itself. The present system criminalises vast areas of conduct that do not involve harm to life or property. This expansion has swollen the caseload of the courts without any corresponding benefit to public safety.

A rational reform programme would begin with decriminalisation.

First, no self-regarding act should be treated as a crime. This necessarily includes the possession and sale of recreational drugs. Whatever one’s moral views, criminalisation has demonstrably failed. It has not eradicated use. It has empowered organised crime and flooded the courts with cases that do nothing to protect others. Removing such offences would immediately and dramatically reduce the number of prosecutions.

Second, no speech or publication should in itself be a crime. England should enjoy at least the same freedom of expression as the United States. The present proliferation of speech offences invites political policing and chills dissent. It generates cases that should never reach a criminal court. Their abolition would further reduce pressure on the system while restoring a basic liberty.

Third, criminal law should be confined to genuine attacks on life and property. These offences should be punished severely, according to clear and predictable tariffs. Mitigation should be limited. Deterrence should be the aim. Certainty of punishment deters more effectively than theatrical severity combined with inconsistency. Whether capital punishment should form part of such a regime is a matter for later and careful consideration. It need not be resolved to recognise that the present system is neither deterrent nor just.

If criminal law were narrowed in this way, it would become feasible to extend jury trial rather than abolish it. Every prosecution carrying the possibility of imprisonment, and any fine beyond the trivial, should be tried by jury.

This would restore coherence. It would align the gravity of potential punishment with the seriousness of the procedure. It would ensure that the community, rather than officials alone, remains the final arbiter of criminal guilt.

Such a reform would indeed require administrative transformation. It would demand efficiency, discipline, and investment. It would require political courage. But the alternative is a system that delivers speed at the expense of legitimacy.

If juries are to assume an expanded role, their composition and conditions must also be addressed. The current system of jury selection is indiscriminate. It treats civic responsibility as interchangeable, regardless of maturity, stability, or capacity. That approach is not defensible.

Persons of low moral and intellectual character should be excluded from jury service. Juries should instead be drawn from married men over the age of thirty who are freeholders. These criteria are not arbitrary. Marriage and property ownership correlate strongly with social stability, responsibility, and independence of judgment. Where relevant, jurors should be tested for competence in the English language. The ability to understand evidence and legal directions is not optional. It is essential.

Jurors should be paid an attendance allowance of £500 per day. This would eliminate the widespread phenomenon of jury avoidance among persons of good character and means. It would ensure that service is not confined to those with the least to lose.

Finally, every jury, when first empanelled, should receive a formal address from the Court Clerk explaining its function and rights. Jurors should be told explicitly that they have the absolute right to reach a verdict according to conscience, even where this means disregarding the law as directed. A jury unaware of its authority is not truly independent.

At bottom, the proposal to abolish jury trials is not about efficiency. It is about trust. The Government no longer trusts the public to participate meaningfully in justice. It prefers professionalised decision-making insulated from popular judgment. This reflects a broader shift in governance. Increasingly, decisions once understood as political or moral are reclassified as technical. Authority is relocated from the citizen to the manager, from the jury to the official, from judgment to process.

Trial by jury stands as an obstacle to this transformation. It is slow because it requires persuasion. It is unpredictable because it allows conscience. It is expensive because liberty costs time. That is why it must be preserved.

The abolition of jury trial for most Crown Court cases would mark a decisive break with England’s constitutional tradition. It would remove one of the last remaining restraints on the prosecutorial power of the State. It would do so not because juries have failed, but because administration has collapsed.

The correct response to that collapse is reform, not retreat. Narrow the criminal law. Restore freedom. Invest in competence. Expand jury trial where liberty is at stake. Efficiency is a worthy aim. But justice without liberty is merely administration. And administration, once unrestrained, has no natural stopping point.

Trial by jury is not an anachronism. It is the institutional expression of a simple truth: that those who govern must persuade those they govern before they punish them. Once that requirement is abandoned, the form of justice may remain, but its substance will already be gone.