Il Ministero della Giustizia rimuove il diritto al processo con giuria per migliaia di casi oggetto di una revisione controversa

>Changes to jury trials are opposed by 90% of the Criminal Bar Association, which has warned that ending the right would be an unacceptable price to pay and undermine what was a fundamental principle for British justice. It said that the British public had a deep faith in the jury system – and that changes risked a loss of trust.

So almost universally hated.

I thought this was regarding protests and direct action, there’s been a series of cases where the jury has refused to convict despite clear evidence that an offence has been committed, [such as these. ](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czdjg0vrl8ro)

But this is a abhorrent proposal and I can’t recall the last time I saw something as bad, … The Iraq War was less controversial than this.

> The government will legislate in the new year to enact most of the recommendations in Leveson’s report which says the backlog for so many serious cases has become so catastrophic that extreme action is necessary.

So this is the Government responding to an expert report into how to improve the criminal justice system (now if only they’d done the same with the last big report by Sir Leveson).

The issue they are claiming to fix is defendants demanding a jury trial, knowing that it will take years to happen, and that during the delay the witnesses and victims will give up and/or move on, and the case will collapse – with the defendant on bail during that time.

There are too many people being prosecuted and not enough courts, judges and lawyers to prosecute them in a full crown court.

So they tried this in Scotland and it was shot down due to the absolute hatred for it from everyone except politicians

Politicians will literally do everything but do fundamental fixing of the justice system

The backlog exists because of 14 years of Tory austerity, cutting the CPS, cutting funding to legal services, and closing courts (my county now has a single Crown Court).

All of which will cost more money to restore to previous levels than was saved by cutting it.

But of course our G7 economy is so heavily geared towards corporate finance that in practical terms we’re also constantly broke, so instead of trying to reverse the decline we’ll just cut centuries-old rights. God forbid we go against Reaganomics.

Frankly for cases which are slam dunk ie cctv catching criminals in the act don’t need a jury

Those who request a jury is case by case and can be denied if its a slam dunk, for major cases like murder and rape etc juries are required unless slam dunk and confession

Overall though we need to speed up the process by having more courts and also longer sentences with repeat offenders getting long and longer time, less time they are less time they can be criminals

It’s slightly different in the US, but I always thought 12 Angry Men shows why juries are so important to our justice system. But if you dig into it, in real life that would have ended in a mistrial and at least one arrest, not for bringing the knife into court, but for having the audacity to check something out himself. Either we believe in juries and trust that the people will do the right thing, or we abolish them completely. What we have now is completely dishonest. I know it’s a weird hill to die on, but this one really bothers me.

What bizzaro world have we ended up in with this supposed party of the Left determined to take away all our civil liberties piece by piece

Aside from the fact that the jury is the last vestige of protection you have from the state, which is presumably why the government are disdainful of them, a lack of juries increases miscarriages of justice.

The UK’s current miscarriage of justice rate is 3% compared to the range in Europe which goes up to 20% in some countries. The lowest comparable nation is the Netherlands, which has a rate of 9%.

This is generally attributed to judges having more faith in prosecutors than the general public does, which leads to the acceptance of flimsier evidence. British judges are also not immune to this as polling has shown they would convict at higher rate than juries do (13-20%, a rate comparable to European judges).

This is quite possibly one of the worst attacks on English liberty the government could mount. Also, like a lot of things they’re doing now, Labour tried doing this in the early 2000s and failed.

I’m just going to throw this out here, as a Yank, that this was one of the principle grievances that the Thirteen Colonies had against George III:

“He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws, by giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation…*For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury.”*

This was referring specifically to the Navigation Acts, which specified that alleged breaches were to be tried in Admiralty courts, which did not have juries and had lower standards of evidence. The judges were paid out of the fines they collected, and naval officers got a reward for “successful” cases.

Sorry, everyone involved in making their money from jury trials is opposed to it! Shock!