Juries will decide only murder, rape or manslaughter cases under a shake-up of the legal system which could signal the beginning of the end for trial by jury.
The majority of cases will be heard by a judge alone, except for the most serious or those deemed to be in the “public interest”.
In a memo seen by The Times, David Lammy, the deputy prime minister and justice secretary, wrote to other ministers and senior civil servants in all government departments this month to say that there was “no right” to jury trials in the UK and that drastic action was needed to cut the backlog of cases in the crown courts in England and Wales.
