PB February-March 2026

February-March 2026 43

By David Langwallner

Juries: redundant lawyers’ bauble

or the last bastion — Starmer’s

Labour doesn’t seem to know

The Jury on Trial

Juries work

Juries, our democratic

conscience

Winston Churchill, ever mindful of institutional

decay, warned as Home Secretary in 1910: “The

mood and temper of the public in regard to the

treatment of crime and criminals is one of the

most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any

country”. The jury, ﬂawed and fallible as it may

be, is that temper incarnate — a democratic

conscience seated twelvefold in oak.

In 1882, senior Irish judges — including

Francis Alexander FitzGerald — resigned rather

than condone new legislation allowing capital

cases to be tried by judge alone. They jointly

warned this would “greatly damage public

conﬁdence in the administration of justice”.

The threat of abolition

In 2026 Ireland, jury trials are constitutionally

mandated only for serious crimes, and are

rare—but carry outsize symbolic and legal

weight. As Chief Justice O’Donnell emphasised

in Murphy v Ireland (2014):

“The constitutional importance of trial by

jury transcends the fact that such trials are

very much the exception rather than the norm

today”.

Jury trials have just been abolished in

Ireland, for defamation trials only. Village

published a piece by retired High Court judge

Bernard Barton, explaining why that was a bad

idea.

The proposed more general curtailment of

jury trials in the United Kingdom, where I now

work, has been met by public and press with

a weary sigh, as if this ancient democratic

institution were an eete and costly luxury.

Opposition parties have rallied against it and

antagonism in the cautious House of Lords is

causing headaches for Starmer.

The problem

The problem is that cases adjourned for three

years are, in my experience in these courts,

now routine. Counsel are unavailable. Listings

are missed. We now inhabit a criminal Jarndyce

v Jarndyce where justice is deferred so long

that its outlines become ghostly. This is down

to Covid, austerity and poor bureaucracy.

Defendants plead not guilty not because they

are innocent, but because they may not live to

stand trial. One recently told me: “I’ll be dead

from cancer before my trial date comes round”.

What remains barely functions. Though

serious cases are prioritised and in a Dunkirk

spirit kind of way everyone is trying to hold it

together in chaos.

The question is not really whether this system

is failing — it plainly is — but whether juries are

responsbible for it and whether trial by jury

itself is still worth defending. Many argue it is

not. Germany, Norway, India, and South Africa

have all substantially restricted or abolished

jury trial. And while one might understand the

particular socio-racial pressures that informed

South Africa’s departure from the jury model,

the broader trend suggests a creeping

technocratic consensus: that law should be

left to the professionals. Moreover jury trial

is no guarantee of good practice: I have seen

jurors fall asleep or doze in a rape and even a

murder trial,

The case against

First, there is no evidence that juries delay

trials. Judge Barton has persuasively made

the case they have the opposite eect

because their verdicts get strong deference

on appeal. A 2026 report by Britain’s Institute

for Government found abolition would save

less than 2% of time in crown courts, Perhaps

recognising this, though one junior justice

minister had expressly said the reform would

have been necessary even if there had not

been a backlog, UK Justice Secretary David

Lammy in recent weeks said he was “open

to conversation” on alternatives as long as

backlogs are cleared, though ominously at

the time of going to print, Keir Starmer was

claiming abolition as “a point of principle”.

Second, they are an outworking of democracy.

Lord Devlin put it best:

“The ﬁrst object of any tyrant would be to

overthrow or diminish trial by jury. it is the

lamp that shows that freedom lives”. When

the state prosecutes, it is not judges who

deliver justice — it is the people, quite literally

sitting in judgment on the state’s case. That

inversion, that check, is what makes the jury

radical even now.

As shown in Clive Ponting (1985), juries

can override legal technicalities in favour of

moral justice. Despite Ponting’s clear breach

of the Ocial Secrets Act in leaking Falklands-

related documents, the jury acquitted him —

recognising a higher public interest. Such acts

LAW

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44 February-March 2026

February-March 2026 PB

of collective conscience are what distinguish

the jury from a tribunal of technocrats.

Camus, in ‘Reﬂections on the Guillotine’

(1957), wrote:

“Knowing themselves to be fallible, [jurors]

at least draw the appropriate consequences.

And true justice is on their side precisely

insofar as logic is not”.

This is not sentimentality. It is realism about

justice in a world of imperfect laws.

Perhaps the best modern argument for the

jury remains Sidney Lumet’s ‘Twelve Angry

Men’ (1957). The opening scene — eleven

jurors eager to convict, one man willing to slow

things down — captures what the jury is: not a

search for certainty, but a collective exercise in

doubt. It is not a device for producing truth; it

is a mechanism for testing its plausibility. The

sole dissenter, an architect played by Henry

Fonda in another of his emblematic portrayals

of the liberal American conscience, dissents…

not because he is convinced of the boy’s

innocence as such, but in order that the other

members of the jury discuss the case in more

detail and they do the case justice.

When I quote this ﬁlm to actual juries in

closing speeches, they respond. They become

vigilant. They take ownership. They ask

questions. Contrary to the cynicism of legal

minimalists, they care.

So, if the jury is an inconvenience, it is

precisely because it remains a safeguard

against convenience — against the state’s

professional convenience. It is democracy

athwart the dock. Reducing protections for

the poor and the most vulnerable is a classic

hollowing out of true democracy.

Fourth, if there are abuses, advocates

and judges are vigilant against them and

sometimes a jury is discharged. I saw one

juror relieved from service as he had objected

to Tony Blair’s jury reforms. Jerome Frank,

the American legal realist, warned of the

“unconscious prejudices” that may aect both

judges and jurors alike: “Hidden, unconscious

biases...plus or minus reactions to women,

or red-haired women, or men with deep

voices...”.

But that is the point: no system is infallible.

The best defence against bias is diversity —

not only of race or class, but of viewpoint. The

judge lives in the courts; the juror does not.

That distinction matters.

Certainly there are concerns. Every big

trial raises fears of populist trials by media.

Likewise, the increasing exposure of jurors

to social media ‘evidence’ makes old

assumptions about impartiality less reliable.

The Simpson case in the US was the nadir of

the dangers of televisation. In Ireland the more

recent Phelan trial indulged a warped political

correctness in the admission of evidence of

animal cruelty by the defendant.

But I consider these are arguments for

reform, not abolition.

Radical threat: the shaky UK

government plan

In November 2025 the Labour government,

fronted by David Lammy and armed with

a report from Lord Leveson, proposed that

new “swift court” procedures would abolish

jury trials for all but the most serious 50%

of oences, retaining them only for murder,

manslaughter, rape, and oences likely to

attract sentences of more than ﬁve, now

further reduced to three, years.

This proposal represents a historic rupture

with centuries of English tradition — and with

Keir Starmer’s own earlier positions. In a 1992

Socialist Lawyer article, Starmer insisted that

the right to trial by jury was “an important

factor in the delicate balance between the

power of the state and the freedom of the

individual”, and argued for extending jury

trials to the magistrates’ courts “despite the

inevitable increase in costs”. Starmer seems

now to be the rupture’s principal champion.

Senior legal ﬁgures responded with alarm.

Labour Baroness Helena Kennedy warned that

the plan would “destroy justice as we know

it”. The four bars of the UK and Ireland issued

a thoughtful joint statement in Jamuary. The

Liberal Democrats noted that, unlike other

stages of the criminal justice system, jury trials

do not show statistical bias against ethnic

minorities.

The Irish dimension:

constitution and contradictions

Article 38.5 of the Irish Constitution guarantees

trial by jury for serious criminal oences.

Though rare in practice — conﬁned mostly

to Circuit Court criminal trials — it carries a

symbolic weight that far exceeds its statistical

footprint.

Yet Ireland also maintains the Special

Criminal Court — a non-jury tribunal originally

designed for terrorist oences. Its jurisdiction,

however, has expanded dramatically. As I have

written elsewhere, its current use in gangland

prosecutions and white-collar cases raises

serious questions about the encroachment of

emergency powers into ordinary law.

The threat of juror intimidation is real, as

Diplock Courts in Northern Ireland showed.

But so is the risk of judges becoming case-

hardened, cynical, or — worst of all —

compromised. That is no abstract concern. The

history of totalitarian regimes is replete with

‘People’s Courts’ that operated as engines of

repression, not justice.

Of course, juries are not immune from error.

Origins: Magna Carta, Greece, and Iceland

The jury, like most civic traditions worth

preserving, did not arise fully formed. The

Athenian dikastai, immortalised in Aeschylus’

‘Eumenides’, oered an early archetype. In

that drama, Athena introduces the notion

of deliberative judgment to end the cycle of

blood vengeance. A split vote is resolved by

the goddess herself — a divine tie-breaker.

In the Wasps, Aristophanes ridiculed jury

service as a compulsive addiction that allows

demagogues to control the poor.

In England, it was the Viking-exported

twelve-man panel — featured in the Icelandic

Njáls Saga — that gradually evolved into the

English jury. By the time of Magna Carta, in the

thirteenth century, its form was recognisable.

“No free man shall be seized or imprisoned,

or stripped of his rights or possessions…

except by the lawful judgment of his equals or

by the law of the land”.

By the reign of Edward III, “law of the land”

had morphed into “due process of law”, which

in practice meant judgment by twelve peers.

The symbolism is deep: the number twelve

echoes not only Greek and Norse models

but also apostolic and astrological orders.

It represents balance, deliberation, and

symbolic universality.

Reform, not removal

Georey Robertson KC once argued that jury

trials should be waivable at the election of the

defendant, as they are in Canada and some

US and Australian states. During COVID-19,

the National Association of Criminal Defence

Lawyers (NACDL) in the US made a similar

case.

Perhaps this compromise — jury by choice

— oers a way forward. But we should not

confuse choice with abolition.

Certainly, the jury system needs reform.

Complex ﬁnancial cases may require expert

lay members or mixed tribunals, à la France.

Juror protection must be enhanced. Procedural

eciency must be addressed. But none

of these require abandonment of the core

principle: that citizens have a right to sit

in judgment of the state — and that their

presence restrains its worst impulses.

Comparative studies (e.g. Durham University

Law School, 2019) suggest that jurisdictions

with robust jury systems tend to enjoy higher

levels of public trust in the judiciary and

stronger constraints on executive overreach.

Our delegated conscience

Juries are imperfect. They are swayed,

ﬂawed, sleepy, inattentive — and only

sometimes heroic. But they keep the state

honest, the law visible, and the citizen

involved. The alternative is not eciency — it

is opacity. It is the quiet slide from democracy

to bureaucratic command.

To abolish the jury is not to modernise the

law. It is to remove its conscience. The jury

is ours. It will be as well that the shameless

Labour government moves to recognise this.

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