Jury service is about more than justice

The Labour government has recently announced its intention to scrap jury trials for all crimes likely to terminate in sentences of less than three years. This decision was formally announced on the 2nd of December, and is seemingly calculated to ease mounting pressure on an ailing and backlogged justice system. However, its opponents have argued that it threatens over eight hundred years of the most fundamental precedent in the Western legal canon.

 Reaction to the announcement has of course come from all points on the political spectrum, some of it reassuring, some of it depressingly predictable. Whilst the president of the Law Society Richard Atkinson has argued that the government risks imperiling the UK’s historic jury system ‘for no effect’, the Magistrate’s Association has apparently welcomed the creation of the new Crown Court division proposed as part of the plan, whilst pressing the case for thousands of new magistrates to staff it. In the press, the Telegraph has branded the proposal an attack on ‘English identity’, whilst the Guardian has pondered how jury-less trials might ‘disadvantage people of colour and other minorities’.

 Amid all this handwringing, what is perhaps most concerning is that virtually no-one has had anything to say whatsoever about the civic significance of the jury system – a concept that seems to have escaped the Labour government’s attention entirely. In an age in which opportunities for citizens to come together in person, to participate directly in the functions of the state, and to engage in communal activity have narrowed significantly, we should be a much more concerned about this than we are. Although evidently forgotten by today’s political class, participation in public life has historically been viewed not just as a means to an end, but as a social good in itself – a process through which ‘civilised man’ (Homo Civicus) is brought to life; the essential training through which the act of genuine ‘self-government’ is both learned and put into real, tangible practice. 

 Dystopian prophecies are everywhere these days, tightly bound up with intricate conspiracy-theories orginating on both left and right. Virtually all dystopian imaginings play on the hollowing out of human sociability, and the notion that the gradual thinning out of human life will continue until all human interaction is unnecessary, and humans themselves superfluous. The preponderance of such narratives reflects real developments: as AI takes over our jobs, so digital home entertainment takes over our leisure time and Amazon takes care of the few remaining domestic duties that might induce us to leave the house. The idea that those running our institutions have little affinity for these concerns, that they might in some way welcome the idea of a fully disaggregated, disengaged, and depoliticised citizenry can only be bolstered by the latest revelation that participation in the justice system is yet one more arena of public life now better handled without us.   

 The act of jury duty is hardly a cure-all for this broader malaise. It is often laborious, highly inconvenient, and sometimes even deeply unsettling. Yet at the same time, it is a profoundly intersubjective and interpersonal activity, one in which collegiality, deliberation, a shared reckoning with evidence, and a sense of collective purpose is played out under conditions of equality. Minus the ‘equality’ part, this makes the act of serving on a jury an analogue for participation in society at large – a reminder that decision-making is a collective enterprise which stands or falls on our ability to communicate, and our capacity to define and recognise shared standards by which to judge the efficacy of a given course of action.      

 Moreover, those who worry about the effect of Jury-less trials on minority defendants might also think about the effect the government’s proposals are likely to have on minority participation on juries themselves. At a time when questions about the health of the United Kingdom’s multicultural settlement are once again at the centre of British politics, opportunities for shared civic engagement should be grasped with both hands. Precisely because of the way in which it selects citizens virtually at random, jury service exposes people to a space in which they are forced (if only for one or two days) out of their silos and into the public realm together. Regardless of background they are compelled to engage with one another in an activity through which their membership in society is both assumed and, indeed, affirmed. In this sense, jury duty is one of those diminishing number of public institutions that levels all before it.  

 Jury duty, then, is about more than simply fulfilling the functions of justice. Rather, it is a crucial symbolic and practical link in the fabric of society itself. Its overhaul in the name of efficiency savings promises to further rob citizens of the opportunity to partake in and fulfil obligations owed to and shared with their fellow citizens. ‘The trouble with socialism’, Oscar Wilde famously quipped, ‘is that it takes up too many evenings’; let us hope that the same logic doesn’t come to rule our vision of the justice system - and with it what remains of public life in general.

Christopher Sarjeant is a freelance writer and researcher who holds a PhD in modern intellectual history. His primary interests include the history of social democratic thought and the development of contemporary American liberalism. 

[Image credit: John Morgan - Buckinghamshire County Museum online, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42113484]