LSE submission on right to jury trials cited in House of Commons committee
Dr Federico Picinali (LSE Law) and Dr Lewis Ross (Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method) recently submitted a paper to the House of Commons Public Bill Committee, concerning the Courts and Tribunals Bill 2024/26 and the question of restricting the right to trial by jury. The paper was cited by Dr Kieran Mullan MP, Shadow Minister for Justice, during the parliamentary discussion. He highlighted points made by Picinali and Ross about the lack of evidence on this subject:
“Given the range of reforms suggested by the Independent Review of the Criminal Courts, their complex interrelation, and the lack of rigorous modelling by independent research groups, we are not confident that the evidential basis for curtailing jury trial has been established.”
Read the Hansard report of the discussion (14/4/26)
The paper was also cited by Rebecca Paul MP during another discussion of the bill:
“Does that not cut to the most basic but most profound concern about this Bill - that it just is not fair? If the threshold cannot reliably distinguish the cases that merit a jury from those that do not, the clause is not preserving jury trial for the most serious cases. It is rationing jury trial on the basis of an impressionistic and sometimes speculative sentence prediction. The written evidence from the London School of Economics says exactly that, stating that the three-year threshold “is a poor metric for determining the right trial procedure” and that if jury trial is a “cornerstone protection against the state”, alternative measures ought to be exhausted first.”