Why does Calamity Lammy and Spineless Starmer want to scrap jury trials?

 I was pondering what's in it for Starmer and Lammy to scrap jury trials?

A quick intro to the law.  There's civil law and criminal law. Jury trials apply to criminal law.  Around 2% of criminal trials actually involve a jury. 

The majority of criminal trials do not have a jury.  For example if I started a fight then that's a criminal offence but is unlikely to heard by a jury. Similarly if I managed to shoplift enough that the police were bothered then that would also be a criminal trial but also not involve a jury.

All criminal hearings have the right to be heard by a jury.  So for example as a landlord if the council decided to criminally prosecute me for not having the correct paperwork, I would insist on a jury since my experience of Judges is they are institutionally biased against landlords.

So Starmer is allegedly a lawyer.  He was also Chief Prosecutor and head of the Crown Prosecution Service so in theory (but probably not in practice) he knows something about criminal law.  You would therefore think he would be in favour of trial by jury as the backbone to the legal system.  

How come he isn't?

So the argument is that the case backlog is huge. 

The Crown court uses the term "receipts" for cases.  This is input load into the system.  It's fairly static at 30,000 cases per year. For example 2016 was around 30,000 and 2025 is around 31,000 with 2019 being around 25,000. 

Similarly the term "disposals" means cases which have been heard. This broadly tracks the "receipts".

The case "backlog" has been running at about 35,000 between 2016 and 2020 and increased during the pandemic and has climbed since.

However the statistics are inconsistent.  For example is says there were 76,957 cases heard in 2024 (stats dont show that) and there were  19,164 open cases (cases unheard) (stats dont show that either).

If nothing else the statistics on this process are a mess...

My own experience of the civil courts is there's a huge backlog and to be honest the legal system is pretty much like any government organisation.  Badly run.  Bureaucratic, Ineffective.

The argument is that our court system is under funded.  That might be true.

The court system costs £13.5 BILLION. HM Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS) employs 18,500 people. So that's a cost of £729,000 per employee.  OK that probably includes costs like buildings, electric etc but still it's a big number.

So let's assume there are about 30,000 Crown Court hearings per year. There are 3,483 court judges. 

Circuit judges are expected to sit for 215-220 days per year. The remaining judges sit for 185-190 days per year. There are 600 circuit judges.

So using the more pessimistic numbers there are 662,355 hearing days per year.  So that gives us 22.1 days duration per hearing. Yet the stats show an average hearing time of 3.8 hours?

So what are these judges doing?  Let's assume the judges only do 1 hearing of 3.8hours per day as they have to spend the rest of the day doing paperwork.  In theory there should be 662,355 hearings per year - far in excess of the case load.

The stats suggest to me that the process is completely in effective.  

So back to Calamity Lammy. The reality is this proposal might shrink the backlog for the Crown court but will simply increase the backlog for the magistrates court.

I also struggle to see how removal of a jury speeds up hearings.  Unless of course Judges are incentivised to make quick decisions.  Hmmm... What happened to a fair hearing?

One of the few things in life I have learnt is "Measurement drives behaviour".

If Judges are being measured on hearing times, or reducing court backlog then don't be surprised if there are more false unfair criminal convictions. 

So the rationale for this change is to reduce the backlog - if it was positioned as a temporary measure to clear the backlog I might have sympathy for it.  But this is a permanent change.

So let's imagine there isn't a jury.  Surely the Judge will have to spend lot's of time deliberating and recording those deliberations so that there's an audit trail.  In other words - more admin for the Judge.  Contrast that with a jury.  The Jury does the deliberation - there's no requirement to document their thought processes - they simply come out with a simple Guilty/Not Guilty decision.  The Judge is not involved in this decision making process.  The Judge does the summing up of the arguments for the jury in order that they can make a decision. Whilst the Jury is deliberating the Judge can be doing other hearings.  If they can't multi-task then there's a clear rationale for having more female Judges who can multi-task.

So if Jury trials save time I suspect in reality it won't save time for the Judge - it will increase their workload.

So what else can we do to clear the backlog?

Given ChatGPT can pass the legal bar exam, it does pose the question whether we can use Robo judges for the more basic hearings.  Unless the AI training is inherently biased, I would expect the Robot Judge to make better decisions. Win-win.

We clearly need someone who understand processes to investigate what's going on.  This looks like a perfect case for Six Sigma. 

I suspect this will go ahead and simply move the bottleneck somewhere else - in the meantime citizen's rights are being eroded.

Finally a word of concern. Generally judges are left wing biased. I can see a political motive for making decisions solely by judges. Let's say Farage was on trial. Judges would be more likely to find him guilty than a more balanced jury. Watch out if this goes ahead....