Hyperbolic cliches fly back and forth in the debate about the abolition of jury trials. The dispute will never be resolved and it distracts from the problem facing us today: how to reduce the current disastrous backlog of cases?
The controversy is not new. If you are in favour, you recite Lord Devlin in 1956: trial by jury is “the lamp that shows that freedom lives”. If you are against, you quote GK Chesterton: “Our civilisation has … very justly decided that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be entrusted to trained men” – cited by Prof Glanville Williams in his challenge to the superstitious reverence for juries in 1963’s The Proof of Guilt.
