Annual Law Reform Lecture: Summing Down the Summing-Up

As the years go by, discussions about juries come and go. They are usually conducted on a high plain of principle, expressing the views of the speaker on the desirability or otherwise of maintaining the jury system…from Lord Devlin’s Hamlyn Lectures in November 1956, published as Trial by Jury, (for) to Sir Louis Blom Cooper, Judge and Jury or Judge Alone, to the British Academy of Forensic Sciences in 2003 (against) to these recent months - Lord Justice Hooper in favour (twice) and Lord Brown in his Oxford High sheriff lecture (on the fence). We hear the ringing tones of oft repeated quotation: if you are in favour you recite Lord Devlin“so that trial by jury is more than an instrument of justice and more than the wheel of the constitution: it is the lamp that shows that freedom lives” or Blackstone: the “glory of the English law”. If you are against you cite Professor Glanville Williams Hamlyn lectures in 1963 The Proof of Guilt and his exposure of the superstitious reverence attached to trial by jury, or you repeat the sour tones of GK Chesterton: “our civilisation has decided and very justly decided that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a task too important to be trusted to trained men”.

It is not surprising that the arguments look to what might be described as familiar sources or, less genially, to cliché. There is little to add to the debate as to the desirability of juries. Indeed it is pointless to do so since no government in the foreseeable future is going to abolish trial by jury. The modern Government does not need to do so; it can finesse the problem and do away with trial altogether. It can control its citizens without prosecution or decline to prosecute at all lest it interfere with commercial relationships or, as it is called nowadays, the communication of intelligence.