16 March 2026
It appears that our human-rights-lawyer Prime Minister — whose government is now planning to restrict the ancient right to trial by jury — has forgotten his own report and views.
Before becoming Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer KC concluded that scrapping jury trials had led to wrongful convictions in Northern Ireland in the 1990s. According to a report uncovered by The Telegraph, he found that removing juries from Troubles-era Crown Court trials resulted in cases “failing to secure reliable convictions based on properly tested evidence”.
This is yet another awkward revelation that threatens to undermine the Government’s efforts to curb the right to trial by jury — in what constitutes the biggest assault on English liberty in over 800 years.
The Courts and Tribunals Bill — which includes the proposed jury reforms — passed its second reading in the House of Commons last week. However, Labour MP and former Shadow Attorney General Karl Turner, who has been leading the Labour revolt against the proposals, says he has the numbers to challenge the Government at report stage.
Last week the Justice Secretary, David Lammy, was forced to guarantee that a Labour rebel would be given a place on the Public Bill Committee in an attempt to prevent a large rebellion at second reading. The membership of the committee is expected to be announced this week, with the first oral evidence session scheduled for Wednesday 25 March.
The unearthed report further highlights the Prime Minister’s apparent change of position. Earlier this year, Sir Keir argued that restricting jury trials was a “fundamental argument of principle” necessary to deliver justice to victims of crime.
Yet the report he helped write in 1992 concluded that removing juries “enables wrongful convictions to occur in the absence of any procedural or judicial error”.
The report examined the operation of the Diplock Court system in Northern Ireland and warned that without juries it becomes “more difficult to raise reasonable doubt”, making convictions far more likely. It also described the process as “bordering on ‘conveyor-belt’ justice”.
Nick Timothy, the Conservative MP and Shadow Justice Secretary, said the Prime Minister “should read the report he helped craft and stop his attack on jury trials”.
He added: “The report contains many of the arguments that critics in Parliament and the legal profession have made against the Bill. Judge-only trials remove vital protections for defendants and place additional burdens and scrutiny on judges.”
Jury trials have been a central feature of the English criminal justice system for centuries and are a principle that Britain has exported across the world. Yet David Lammy now wants to restrict access to jury trials in a move that the Four Criminal Bars have warned would undermine public trust in the justice system.
Under the proposals, juries would be reserved primarily for the most serious offences — including murder, rape and manslaughter — and other crimes carrying sentences of more than five years.
Karl Turner, who is leading the Labour rebels, said: “Like David Lammy, the Prime Minister knows full well that doing away with jury trials in serious criminal cases — those that currently carry sentences of up to three years’ imprisonment — is unjust, unworkable, unpopular and unnecessary. The tragedy is that Keir Starmer, as Prime Minister, knows the cost of jury trials but is prepared to ignore the value of this 800-year-old right of those accused and prosecuted by the state.”
Read more in The Telegraph.
