Rob Rinder
Published November 26, 2025 3:12pm
Updated November 26, 2025 3:17pm
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Rob Rinder: The right to a jury trial in the most serious criminal cases is not a historical flourish but a guardrail(Picture: ITV/REX/Shutterstock)
If you stand back and look coldly, almost clinically, at our criminal justice system, the case against jury trials might seem almost persuasive.
Picture it: a court estate worn thin, trials postponed so far into the future they feel almost abstract on the calendar, victims ageing alongside their unanswered questions, defendants’ lives suspended like dust motes in a sunbeam.
We ask 12 strangers, plucked from the daily business of life, to abandon work, family and obligations to sift complex evidence that sometimes baffles even experienced lawyers.
A cynic might say it borders on the archaic, an expensive ritual from a slower, more indulgent age.
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Previous Page Next PageJudges, after all, already handle the brisk churn of summary cases; why shouldn’t they also take on more of the mid-level offences, especially dishonesty ones?
Wouldn’t that be swifter, neater, more modern? In a world obsessed with efficiency, one could argue jury trials are an echo: noble, yes, but impractical.
It is a seductive thought. Poetic, even, but dangerously wrong. Because the right to a jury trial in the most serious criminal cases is not a historical flourish but a guardrail, one of the few remaining defences against the immense power of the state.
Criminal dishonesty trials demand something different: the collective instinct drawn from 12 people (Picture: Getty Images)
And now, in England and Wales, they are under threat.
Long before anyone packaged ‘British values’ into classroom wall charts, they existed as living principles anchored in institutions.
One of the oldest is recorded in Magna Carta: that no one should lose liberty except by the lawful judgment of their equals. That idea is not medieval pageantry; it is the architecture of our freedom.
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If that sounds theoretical, it shouldn’t. States rarely abandon fairness overnight; they drift from it.
A shortcut here, a ‘temporary measure’ there, a quiet concentration of authority justified by efficiency. It is in those small, incremental erosions, long before any headline-grabbing crisis, that power becomes unmoored from public accountability.
A jury is the moment the state must stop, sit back, and explain itself to 12 ordinary citizens. Without that, the slide towards injustice is not dramatic; it is silent.
David Lammy wants to bring an end to most jury trials (Picture: PA)
Dishonesty offences, fraud, deception, false accounting, are often offered up as candidates for judgeonly trials. They seem technical, almost administrative.
But they hinge not on whose truth is preferred but on identifying what dishonesty actually is: the intention behind the act, the moral faultline beneath the paperwork, the human behaviour concealed behind numbers and narrative.
A jury is the moment the state must stop, sit back, and explain itself to 12 ordinary citizens
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These are not mere paper crimes. They are examinations of motive and credibility. And it is here (not just in cases of murder and violent crime) that juries really matter.
Judges are remarkable. Their discipline, precision and mastery of the law are essential. And yes, they routinely decide facts in civil trials where money is at stake.
But criminal dishonesty trials demand something different: the collective instinct drawn from 12 people from 12 different corners of life, reading tone, hesitation, body language, and the subtle inconsistencies that reveal far more than any legal submission. That human breadth cannot be replicated by one professional, however capable.
Judges are remarkable (Picture: Getty Images)
Some argue that juries are slow or inconvenient. They can be.
But the question is not whether juries are perfect; it is whether concentrating the power to decide serious criminal guilt entirely in the hands of the state would be safer.
It would not.
Remove juries, and justice becomes something done to the public rather than by the public.
We must also face a harder truth: defending people accused of crime is difficult. Some elicit sympathy; others decidedly do not. But rights are not moral rewards for the virtuous.
They protect all of us, including those whom society finds irritating, unlikeable or even culpable. That universality is the essence of British liberty.
The truth is simple: juries endure because they keep the justice system honest (Picture: ITV)
And let us finally dispense with the fiction that trimming jury trials will, alone, miraculously fix the backlog. It won’t.
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What will restore timely justice is proper investment, courtrooms that function, staff paid fairly, barristers who can afford to stay in the profession, interpreters, listing officers, buildings that don’t leak, and enough judges to hear cases.
Everything else is political conjuring.
The truth is simple: juries endure because they keep the justice system honest. They ensure that when the state seeks to take away someone’s liberty, it must justify that act to the public itself.
And if preserving that safeguard occasionally slows the wheels of justice, it remains the smallest price imaginable for the most precious thing it protects; our freedom.
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