Below is my column in The Wall Street Journal on the move to sharply curtail the use of jury trials in Great Britain. The ill-conceived move is the work of Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor David Lammy, who previously denounced the idea as an abandonment of British values and the loss of a critical protection for citizens. It is a tragic variation on Winston Churchill’s legendary observation about the fleeting virtue of the insufferably sanctimonious. Like the socialite who was indignant when Churchill puckishly offered a small amount of money to sleep with him, it turns out that Lammy was “just haggling over price.” When faced with significant savings, Lammy is willing to toss aside the right that once defined them as a people.
Here is the column:
“Criminal trials without juries are a bad idea,” Labor MP David Lammy said in 2020 as he denounced calls to reduce jury trials in criminal cases to save money. Now secretary of state for justice and lord chancellor, Mr. Lammy is seeking a major rollback on the quintessential right secured more than 800 years ago in the Magna Carta.
According to media reports, the government previously sought to remove jury trials for all cases involving a maximum jail term of five years. Now the government is moving to allow jury trials for “indictable-only” offences such as murder and “either-way” offenses with likely sentences of more than three years in prison. Judge-only “swift” courts will hear cases ranging from burglary, theft, fraud, sexual assault to stalking. Judges will also sit without a jury in fraud and financial cases deemed too complex for jurors.
For some of us, the greatest concern lies in how these reforms will interact with the prosecution of speech offenses. In the last two decades, free speech protections in the U.K. have been eviscerated. The criminalization of speech has expanded exponentially as individuals and groups call the police to silence those who criticize them or advocate opposing views.
Even silent prayer or “toxic ideologies” can lead to arrest. Expressing concerns over Western cultural values is now treated as an admission of “right-wing ideology,” warranting investigation. In April, the Times reported that police are making around 12,000 arrests per year over online posts.
Under the new proposal, these cases would generally be heard without juries, which may represent the last hope for free-speech advocates seeking to blunt the government’s onslaught. Research by the Free Speech Union in Britain indicates that defendants in speech cases are twice as likely to be acquitted by a jury than by a judge.
We have already seen justice meted out by British judges in speech cases. A few years ago, a neo-Nazi living with his mother was found to have a room filled with hateful symbols and material.
Judge Peter Lodder dismissed free speech concerns over the defendant’s possessions with a truly Orwellian flourish: “I do not sentence you for your political views, but the extremity of those views informs the assessment of dangerousness.” Calling the defendant “a right-wing extremist,” Mr. Lodder said the contents of his room were evidence of “enthusiasm for this repulsive and toxic ideology.”
Unlike Americans, the British tend to presume that government action is guided by benign motives. And the collapse of free speech in the U.K. has been, in part, due to the lack of American-style protections—like the First Amendment—for antigovernment or unpopular speech.
It is a crushingly ironic moment for both countries. Jury trials were a major catalyst in Americans’ early struggle against British abuses, as I discuss in my forthcoming book, “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
We are, in fact, approaching the 300th anniversary of one of the most important speech trials in American history, that of John Peter Zenger, editor of the New-York Weekly Journal. Zenger was arrested for exposing the corruption of colonial Governor William Cosby. After replacing the original judge and disqualifying Zenger’s counsel, the Crown lost its case when it was defied by a jury, which acquitted Zenger, even though under existing laws the paper’s writings were, indeed, libelous. One of the earliest examples of jury nullification in North America, this case influenced the Founders as they moved to guarantee public trials by jury in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Back in 2020, Mr. Lammy stressed that jury trials were a bulwark against government abuse and a guarantor of justice, that they acted as “a filter for prejudice.” Now, as justice secretary, he finds jury trials to be too expensive and unnecessary.
Chairman of the Criminal Bar Association Riel Karmy-Jones has said the anti-jury proposal sends “a wrecking ball” through the British system of justice. She is right.
If London doesn’t listen, we’ll see the U.K. regress closer to an earlier, more oppressive state in which citizens are subjects, not the source, of British justice.
Mr. Turley is a law professor at George Washington University and author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution,” forthcoming in February.
The Brits already have experience with jury-less trails…they were called “Diplock courts” and were used in Northern Ireland during the Troubles when juries trying defendants for serious crime had to worry what Protestant and Catholic terrorist groups might do if a conviction was handed down….
*. It’s surprising with so many women and girls making claims with nothing more than a single photograph or none at all that there isn’t a single offspring nor abortion claim additionally as with Hunter Biden and the stripper scandal.
Wealthy people rarely expose themselves or their money and remain anonymous in general. Layers of lawyers provide that anonymity.
This reminds me of the Eagles song, “Dirty Laundry.”
“I make my living off the evening news
Just give me something-something I can use
People love it when you lose,
They love dirty laundry
Well, I coulda been an actor, but I wound up here. I just have to look good, I don’t have to be clear. Come and whisper in my ear
Give us dirty laundry.”
“. . . he finds jury trials to be too expensive . . .”
UK welfare spending is about $400 *billion*. Why is that not considered “too expensive.”
I’m deeply skeptical of jury trials, and not because they are expensive.
A panel of judges (not a single judge) would offer more respect for the rule of law.
A panel composed of a couple judges and a couple jurors would be better still.
so… arbitration? You just defined arbitration.
Have you ever served on a jury? Don’t fall for Trump’s crap, he’s not able to look at juries objectively. Juries get it right 99.9% of the time. You never hear about those verdicts. You only hear about the 0.1% that are controversial.
Juries who agree unanimously are a great font of common sense. They are a check on bias and disinformation..
Vice President J.D. Vance told the security conference in Munich that if the other governments there were afraid of their own voters, the USA can’t do anything for them. We hold that government adapts to liberty. The UK presently looks like it is trying to adapt liberty to government. J.D Vance’s confidence in his position shook up the other attendees. They apparently forgot the lesson in a conversation Winston Churchill had with a lady at a gathering about confidence in position. She said “Prime Minister, you are drunk.” He said “ And you Madame are fat. In the morning I shall be sober.”
The actual coup was Obama.
Get off the net but then you know that. ~who will make you phishers of men? Cast your net?
Doggone homophones. Obama gets the distinction of the biggest loser. 😂
Ciao
^^^^ Sloppy programmers. A misplaced comma can crash an entire system, lazy Americans. DJT is importing 86, 000 people to clean it up.
😂.
^^^ I voted for him twice. 😂
PT, it appears the lords and ladies have returned to the peerage. A jury of your peers.
American history is quite interesting as it is very old and rooted in philosophy.
Thank you.
“Americans Must Give Their Country and Their Prosperity Away”
“It’s The Law, Apparently.”
I’m an American. My ancestors first arrived here in 1607. I want my country invaded, conquered, and taken over by people who are not Americans and were denied citizenship and various and sundry other foreigners and illegal aliens, past and present. I want foreigners and illegal aliens to vote in my country. I want to give all my money and private property to parasitic foreign invaders as “free stuff,” “free status,” welfare, affirmative action, and governmental taxpayer charity. I want to give my country away. Those are my deepest longings and greatest desires as an unhyphenated and patriotic, actual American.
This is what happens when you confiscate the people’s lawfully owned firearms. And flood the country with Great Replacement voters who will ensure you are never turned out of office. Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” now extends to the Atlantic seawall. The Administration needs to issue a travel advisory on the UK. We also need to pull out of NATO. There is no way in hell that our tax dollars should be propping up dictatorships like this.
The judicial branch is busy “INTERPRETING” America into the domain of foreigners.
Is there a better solution than limiting jury trials? I grew up in Detroit and assume the growing crime in the UK is causing the same problems. Our justice systems are not designed for an unlimited amount of crime. They assume some degree of normalcy. I saw what happens when more and more tax revenue goes to the police and courts and there isn’t enough left over to pick up the garbage and keep the streets clean. It doesn’t take much to overwhelm the system and devolve into chaos. I am appalled at the loss of civil liberties in parts of Europe as I was in the U.S., a few years ago. But I would like to see some sensible alternatives.
There are no sensible alternatives to jury trials.
There are however many possible sensible changes that can be made to our criminal justice system.
That said ALL suffer the same problem as jury trials – he are expensive. Impovements to our criminal justice system are luxury goods.
We CAN as a prosperous society afford them.
Many of the things that the left pushes – actually have promise – if not applied idiotically like Biden’s open borders.
There are alternatives to jailing people before trial, even to sending them to prison.
But they do not work for all alleged criminals and crimes.
How much would you pay to reduce the odds that a murderer released from prison does not kill again.
We do not have a means to guarante that – except the death penalty.
But we do have means that do reduce the odds But they do not stop- all recidivism, they just recuse it.
I think that is reasonable for a prosperous society.
But we should not pretend it is a replacement for law enforcement.
The Democrats don’t want these illegal aliens deported.
https://www.dhs.gov/wow
They have abandoned any attempt at being patriotic Americans – I question their ability to understand what that even represents. Destroying our Constitutional sovereignty as a Republic is their target-goal.
Dear Prof Turley,
The only thing more shocking than the stinging vicissitudes of lawless decay in the U.S. is the depths of civic depravity going on in the old garden spots of western Europe .. . especially in the U.K.
Starmer, Macron and Merz are about as popular as the Plague. The once-vaunted U.S./Nato military alliance, writ large, is now a lingering, delusional threat to the functional authority of the United Nations and a more unified world. .. fwiw.
*MP Sir George Galloway is living in exile .. .
I was derailed by the purported Churchill anecdote in the intro to the column, suspecting it had been George Bernard Shaw. This history of the genre seems authoritative: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/03/07/haggling/
According to the New York Post in 1936 it was Lord Beaverbrook and a Yankee actress, but Prof. Turley’s version was in the Nevada State Journal in 1962. The punchline with “haggling” came from a U. S. House of Representatives subcommittee hearing in 1955. Turley probably heard it as a House page from another page.
“Sentence first, trial later” said the Queen of Hearts, “Off with is head!”
Stupid rules of engagement.
*Kill them all = ‘lethal, kinetic’ strikes ~ Sec of War, Pete Hegseth
Give em a fair trial then hang em.
Draw And Quarter
*. Dame Sarah Mullally will be the first female Archbishop of Canterbury.
If the democrats regain power we could be at risk here, just look at the decisions being made by their activist judges.
COULD be at risk? Define the risk.
What decisions?