Juries decide the outcome of about 1 per cent of criminal cases in England and Wales, and yet the jury system is permanently under threat. The latest threat comes in Sir Brian Leveson’s Independent Review of the Criminal Courts, which the government commissioned to deal with the ever growing backlog of cases in the Crown Court. Leveson suggests replacing the jury with a judge and two magistrates in a range of cases in which defendants can currently choose trial by jury rather than trial by magistrates; he also recommends that many offences become exclusively triable by magistrates alone.
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