Should Jury Trials Be Scrapped?
The Trial
The Crime Desk
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 1 December 2025
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Should juries be scrapped? In this special bonus episode Caroline and Liz investigate leaked plans from the justice secretary to abolish jury trials for the majority of cases. It would be a fundamental change to our justice system. And it’s not gone down well.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi and welcome to the trial UK. I'm Caroline Cheatham. And I'm Liz Hull. So we're here back recording on a Monday morning for a change. And that's because we're bringing you a bonus episode today. When Liz and I were in Liverpool last week covering the case of Paul Doyle, |
| 0:25.6 | we brought you that episode as it broke on Tuesday last week. |
| 0:29.6 | And as we were there, another story was breaking, which we thought was really significant. |
| 0:34.0 | And it was David Lammy's leaked proposals to get rid of jury trials. Pretty much |
| 0:40.9 | abolish all the jury trials apart from for certain ones, so murder, manslaughter and rape. The idea |
| 0:48.0 | being that it would get rid of, or at least diminish to some degree the backlog in our court system. Liz, do you want to just |
| 0:57.2 | outline what we know from the report that's in the Times in the middle of last week? And also, |
| 1:03.2 | of course, this prompted an awful lot of reaction all weekend, which we suspected it would, |
| 1:09.2 | which is why we had this episode ready in the diary |
| 1:12.6 | to record this morning. |
| 1:14.4 | Well, as far as I can work out, I haven't spoken to a single barrister that's in favour |
| 1:18.0 | of this, so I'm not quite sure where David Lammy and the government have got this idea from. |
| 1:23.2 | We know it was a leaked report, so obviously I think there's more concern amongst barristers |
| 1:28.2 | that it's been leaked because it doesn't seem to be that many of them have been consulted |
| 1:32.3 | or any of them have been consulted on it. And what it would mean is that, like you said, Caroline, |
| 1:36.8 | juries would be scrapped for any in the most serious public interest cases would they be retained? |
| 1:42.4 | So murder, manslaughter, rape. We know, don't we, |
| 1:45.6 | that earlier in the year, Brian Leverson was asked by the government to do a review of the criminal |
| 1:50.7 | justice system. The idea is to try and get rid of this huge backlog that we've got, |
| 1:55.9 | the hangover from the pandemic, really. We know that there's 80,000 cases still in the system that are waiting |
| 2:02.4 | to get to court. Around three courses of those are trials that are waiting to come to court. |
| 2:09.4 | So the government are desperately trying to improve matters for victims because obviously you get |
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