Good morning. Has the government put the cart before the horse with its plans to radically restrict jury trials? Would it have been more constructive to tackle court efficiency — making the existing proceedings work properly — before embarking on rewriting centuries of practice? That’s the argument by some criminal barristers, who say there are simpler solutions to tackling the backlog that don’t require such a controversial reconfiguration of the justice system.
The absence of government modelling to justify curtailing the right to trial by jury has allowed opponents to make all the running — and that may yet precipitate another Labour U-turn. It has also exposed a lack of good data to monitor one specific problem that is contributing to trial delays every day.
Read more at The Financial Times
