The Lamp That Shows Freedom Lives: David Lammy, Jury Trial, and the Slow Unmaking of English Liberty
The leak from the Ministry of Justice, labelled “Official – Sensitive,” reveals that David Lammy, now Lord Chancellor, is considering a proposal that would confine jury trials to a narrow band of the most serious offences: murder, manslaughter, rape, and a handful of “public interest” cases. All other serious criminal allegations — potentially carrying custodial sentences of up to five years — would be tried by a professional judge alone, or by a judge sitting with two magistrates. According to current estimates, three quarters of all jury trials could disappear under this scheme¹.
The justification offered is the Crown Court backlog, hovering around eighty thousand cases, with victims waiting years for resolution. But the proposed solution is not investment, reform, or capacity. It is to reduce the role of the jury itself. This is not an administrative adjustment. It is a constitutional rupture.
Lammy’s reversal: from defender to dismantler
The political irony is sharp. In June 2020, amid COVID-era disruptions to jury trials, Lammy — then Shadow Justice Secretary — publicly rejected calls for judge-only trials. He insisted that “jury trials are a fundamental part of our democratic settlement” and declared that “criminal trials without juries are a bad idea.”² Yet only five years later, he fronts proposals that would remove juries from the majority of serious cases.
That performative defence of liberty in 2020 has become a programme of its dismantling in 2025. The principle held in adversity is now being abandoned in convenience.
Leveson’s ‘intermediate court’ – and why Lammy goes far beyond it
Defenders of the proposals point to Sir Brian Leveson’s review, which suggested an “intermediate court” within the Crown Court: a judge sitting with two lay magistrates for some mid-tier cases³. But Leveson retained the centrality of the jury. He never proposed replacing it wholesale with judge-only trials. Lammy’s plan, by contrast, removes the jury from 75% of Crown Court work and confines it to a thin constitutional relic.
To describe this as simply “implementing Leveson” is a sleight of hand. It is not cautious reform; it is structural inversion.
The common-law pedigree of the jury: a constitutional safeguard
Unlike some jurisdictions, England and Wales do not rely upon a single codified constitutional document. The common law itself forms the architecture of liberty. Among its pillars, trial by jury is pre-eminent.
Blackstone, writing in the eighteenth century, described jury trial as “the palladium of English liberties” and warned that the nation’s freedoms “cannot but subsist, so long as this palladium remains sacred and inviolate.”⁴ Lord Camden called it “the very foundation of our free constitution.”⁵ Lord Eldon termed it “the greatest blessing which the British constitution has secured to the subject.”⁶ Lord Judge, in our own time, said it “stands as a safeguard against oppression and dictatorship.”⁷
Lady Justice Hallett, surveying the tradition in a major 2017 lecture, affirmed the same point: the jury remains “central to our idea of public justice” after eight centuries.⁸
Patrick Devlin’s Hamlyn Lectures remain the most eloquent articulation of the principle:
“Trial by jury is more than an instrument of justice and more than one wheel of the constitution; it is the lamp that shows that freedom lives.”⁹
Even Magna Carta — while not a modern jury trial — stated the ancestor principle: “No free man shall be taken or imprisoned… except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.”¹⁰ Judgment by peers, not agents of the Crown, is the heart of the matter.
What is really causing the backlog
The government insists that jury trials are too slow, too expensive, too cumbersome. But this is to mistake the symptom for the disease. According to the Bar Council, the Criminal Bar Association, and decades of professional analysis, the crisis is rooted not in juries but in chronic underinvestment:
- decades of restricted sitting days
- insufficient judges and recorders
- closed courtrooms and dilapidated estates
- hollowed-out legal aid
- collapsing trials for want of resources
- disclosure failures
- procedural inefficiencies
The Criminal Bar Association has stated unequivocally that “juries are not the cause of the backlog” and that removing them “will not repair the system but will erode public confidence.”¹¹ The Bar Council likewise warns that removing juries is “an extreme measure” and insists that every alternative must be attempted before touching the constitutional structure.¹²
To starve an institution for decades and then declare it “unfit for purpose” is political vandalism disguised as reform.
The danger of judge-only justice
Professional judges are conscientious, but they are agents of the state. They are appointed, salaried, promoted, and appraised within state structures. To give them unilateral power to decide fact and law in the majority of serious cases is to concentrate power in precisely the place the common law has always sought to diffuse it.
Lord Denning once remarked that “juries bring the standards of the ordinary man to bear upon the actions of others,” describing this as the essence of justice in a free nation.¹³ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in the American common-law tradition, called the jury “the great corrective of the law.”¹⁴
Lord Hewart’s maxim — “justice must not only be done, but must manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done”¹⁵ — rings particularly loudly here. Verdicts rendered by a small professional caste do not command the same public legitimacy as verdicts delivered by twelve citizens drawn from the community.
From neglect to ‘modernisation’: the political pattern
A familiar pattern emerges:
- Underfund an institution for decades.
- Allow it to decay.
- Announce that it is no longer viable.
- “Modernise” it by removing the safeguards that once constrained the state.
That pattern now reaches the criminal courts. The jury — the people’s share in the administration of justice — is portrayed as an inconvenience. The result is a quiet transfer of authority from the community to the state, from peers to functionaries, from liberty’s lamp to bureaucratic darkness.
Historical and Theological Reflection
The English jury stands not only within a legal continuum but within a Christian moral imagination shaped over a millennium. Medieval Christians understood justice not as a mere administrative transaction but as a discernment performed coram Deo — before the face of God. In the early common-law courts, jurors were not passive spectators but oath-bound neighbours compelled to speak truth as a sacred duty. Their verdict was rendered under oath invoking divine judgment, reflecting the theological conviction that truth is not manufactured by power but discovered by conscience.
This link between conscience and community is rooted in Christian anthropology: the human person bears the imago Dei and possesses moral agency that no state can monopolise. A system in which the verdict belongs not to the ruler but to the people embodies a profoundly Christian intuition — that justice requires both authority and communion, structure and participation.
The long historical memory of English law preserves this. Magna Carta’s appeal to “judgment of peers” reflects a medieval theological vision in which truth is safeguarded by a community of the faithful, not dictated by princely will. Blackstone, writing in a still Christian England, perceived jury trial as a safeguard precisely because it allows ordinary consciences, illumined by natural law and moral instinct, to restrain the excesses of state authority. Devlin, writing after the devastations of totalitarianism, understood that the jury’s function is not administrative but moral: it ensures that justice remains tethered to the lived experience and upright conscience of the people.
When St Paul wrote that rulers are ordained “for the praise of good works and the punishment of evil,” he presupposed that the community participates in discerning that good and evil. A justice system detached from the people inevitably drifts toward abstraction, technocracy, and ultimately the instrumentalisation of the human person. A justice system rooted in lay judgment acknowledges what the Church has always taught: that the truth about human action is best discerned where human beings, in their plurality and their fallibility, deliberate under the shadow of a higher law.
The erosion of jury trial therefore touches a deeper nerve. It risks severing the moral bond between the governed and the governing. It reduces justice to the verdict of an institution rather than the judgment of a people. And it forgets the theological truth that no state can substitute itself for the collective conscience of those made in the image of God.
The question now before Parliament
If these proposals proceed to legislation, Parliament will be asked to decide whether England and Wales should cease to allow citizens to judge their fellow citizens in most serious cases.
The issue is not merely procedural. It is foundational. It concerns who stands between the individual and the penal power of the state. Devlin’s warning remains the sharpest: trial by jury is the lamp that shows freedom lives. To extinguish that lamp to hide the shadows of governmental neglect is not merely misguided. It is dangerous.
A nation that abandons its juries abandons its liberties. And once abandoned, liberties are not easily reclaimed.
¹ Reporting on the leaked Ministry of Justice memo and projected effects on jury-trial volume; national media coverage, November 2025.
² David Lammy, public statement during COVID-era disruptions to jury trials, 20 June 2020.
³ Sir Brian Leveson, Independent Review of the Criminal Courts, Ministry of Justice (2025).
⁴ William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book IV, ch. 27.
⁵ Statement attributed to Lord Camden, summarised in Lady Justice Hallett, Blackstone Lecture, 22 May 2017.
⁶ Statement attributed to Lord Eldon, cited in Lady Justice Hallett, Blackstone Lecture, 22 May 2017.
⁷ Lord Judge, Kalisher Lecture (2010).
⁸ Lady Justice Hallett, “Trial by Jury: Past, Present and Future,” Blackstone Lecture, 22 May 2017.
⁹ Lord Devlin, Trial by Jury (Hamlyn Lectures, 1956).
¹⁰ Magna Carta (1215), clause 39.
¹¹ Criminal Bar Association, public commentary and professional statements opposing removal of jury trials, 2024–2025.
¹² Bar Council, official statements on jury-trial reform and the criminal court backlog, 2020–2025.
¹³ Lord Denning, The Due Process of Law (1980).
¹⁴ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Collected Legal Papers (1920).
¹⁵ Lord Hewart CJ, R v Sussex Justices ex parte McCarthy [1924].
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