Matthew Scott

In June 2020 the impact of Covid led some to argue that trial by jury should be temporarily suspended. David Lammy, who was at the time the shadow justice secretary, strongly opposed the idea. He tweeted: ‘Jury trials are a fundamental part of our democratic settlement. Criminal trials without juries are a bad idea.’ It now appears that Lammy thinks the time has come, and that he is the man, to destroy this fundamental part of our democratic settlement. He intends the destruction to be permanent. A memo seen by the Times says he is preparing to end jury trials except for murder, rape or manslaughter cases. The sole justification for this vandalism appears to be efficiency savings.

Today’s report by the National Audit Office on the backlog of cases in the Crown Court is unlikely to feature much in the election campaign, but it examines an aspect of criminal justice policy which will need to be addressed very urgently by the next government.   In April last year the Ministry of Justice had a plan: to reduce the backlog from around 60,000 cases to about 53,000 by April 2025. The increasing number of cases waiting to be heard was not only demoralising witnesses, victims and defendants, it was also driving up the prison population as remand prisoners found themselves waiting ever longer to have their cases heard.    Astonishingly, less was spent annually on prisons in 2023 than in 2010.

In 1894 Maria Hermann, an Austrian-born prostitute stood trial at the Old Bailey for the murder of a client. The evidence seemed overwhelming and she faced a death sentence if convicted. But she had the remarkable good fortune to be defended by Edward Marshall Hall, the greatest criminal advocate of the day. He produced evidence of the wretched life which had led her into a life of poverty, prostitution and degradation. At the end of his closing speech Hall slowly turned and looked towards the dock. ‘Look at her, members of the jury. God never gave her a chance, won’t you?’ The jury cleared her of murder, and in convicting her of manslaughter added a recommendation for mercy; a recommendation acted on by the judge who imposed a remarkably lenient six-year sentence.

Until a few years ago I had never heard of a single case of a murderer declining to go into the dock to hear their sentence. I doubt whether any of them even realised that they had the choice.  Yet in recent years, the word seems to have spread and something of a fashion has developed for them to stay in their cells and refuse to enter the court-room.  It hardly surprising that many bereaved relatives are astonished and disgusted that such a thing is possible.  Judges, including Mr Justice Goss at Lucy Letby’s sentencing hearing, have decided that they have no power to do anything but accept this state of affairs.

It has been announced that ‘Opertion Soteria’ is to be extended from five pilot areas to every police force in the country. Operation Soteria is the name given to a supposedly new method of investigating rape and other serious sexual allegations. A report into the results of the Soteria pilots, written by the academics who were largely responsible for devising Operation Soteria in the first place, concluded, perhaps unsurprisingly, that they had been a great success. The Soteria approach may indeed increase the rape conviction rate, but it will do so by convicting more innocent people In Hellenistic religions, a soteria was a ‘sacrifice or series of sacrifices performed in expectation of... deliverance from a crisis.

When seven Just Stop Oil protesters were convicted of trespassing, the judge in the case had some warm words for those found guilty.  District Judge Graham Wilkinson at Wolverhampton Magistrates' Court praised the activists’ ‘admirable aims’ after they disrupted operations at an Esso fuel terminal in Birmingham last April. Wilkinson told the group during the end of the trial last week that he was moved by their ‘deeply emotive’ explanations. This was a strange thing to say to those whose crime was not entirely victimless: the cost to the Metropolitan Police alone of the Just Stop Oil Protests over the days of the protests exceeded £425,000, to say nothing of the disruption to people going about their ordinary business.

Having said just days ago that they had no objection to Sue Gray’s report being published, the Met have now executed a screeching, tyre-burning U-turn and have asked that the parts of her report dealing with the most serious allegations – the only parts in which anyone has any interest – should not be published until they have completed their own investigation. No. 10 will be more than happy to comply. Nobody can be in any doubt about the staggering, bumbling ineptitude of its presentation, but the latest Met position does actually make some sense.

What should we make of the Times story yesterday, which appeared under the headline ‘Boris Johnson Plans To Let Ministers Throw Out Legal Rulings’? The impression given is that ministers will somehow be handed powers by the Prime Minister simply to ignore court rulings that they do not like. That would lead to an extraordinary constitutional crisis, involving either the arrest and imprisonment of ministers for contempt of court, or the arrest and imprisonment of judges with the government exercising Erdogan-style despotism. Nobody can seriously believe that this is what is intended, and the rest of the Times story makes clear that it is not.

On Monday evening Sir Keir Starmer tweeted an explanation for why Labour would not be supporting the Police, Crime Sentencing and Courts Bill. https://twitter.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1371547120080195585?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Coming from a former director of public prosecutions this was dire stuff. First, and perhaps least importantly, the word ‘statues’ does not appear in the Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill. Sir Keir knows this. What the Bill proposes is that where criminal damage is caused to a ‘memorial’ there should be no minimum financial limit before the case can be tried in the Crown Court, where the maximum sentence is ten years imprisonment.