People in Britain like to think that the concept of a jury trial, as we know it today, goes back nearly a thousand years. While it’s true that King Henry II established a jury of 12 local knights to settle disputes over the ownership of land in the 1100s, jury trials have changed immeasurably in the centuries since.
But now, the British government, without making a public case and lacking a popular mandate, is set to change it all. Faced with crumbling infrastructure and overwhelmed courts, the Labour government announced plans at the end of last year to remove jury trials for criminal cases where the guidelines dictate a sentence of less than three years. Defendants in these cases would no longer be allowed to choose to be judged by their peers.
“The latest Ministry of Justice proposal presages one of the most radical and revolutionary events in English legal history,” said Geoffrey Rivlin, a retired judge giving evidence to a parliamentary committee examining the changes. “Yet it has not appeared in any manifesto; it has not been put out for consultation.”
