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Open letter to prime minister Sir Keir Starmer

Dear Keir,

When you were a criminal defence barrister you were held in high regard as an educator on the importance of human rights. There seemed to be no end to your training sessions and practitioner manuals.

It was a little surprising therefore seeing you travel to China, where according to the latest Amnesty International report: “Human rights defenders were arrested, prosecuted and sentenced to long prison terms”.
That you took the opportunity on that trip to announce your support for the removal of the right to a trial by jury was, I suppose, befitting with the setting and the proposal not being in your manifesto.

Your dispatch impelled me to remind you of the compelling arguments you yourself made back in 1992 defending jury rights. You may recall that you even urged their expansion:

“The right to trial by jury is an important factor in the delicate balance between the power of the state and the freedom of the individual. The further it is restricted, the greater the imbalance. Despite the inevitable increase in costs, the Haldane Society urges that there be a right of trial by jury in all criminal cases.”

No doubt your approach back then would have been impacted by your experience, as a budding lawyer venturing out to the magistrates’ court, of its arbitrary nature.

No doubt you represented clients before District Judge Roger Davies at Horseferry Road Magistrates, who had a penchant for bullying young male advocates. Until, of course, he had to resign in 2012 after The People exposed that he had been paying for sex with “rent boys”.

Or there was “Custody Cooper” at Greenwich, a district judge whose moniker needs no explanation as to what was likely to happen in his court, with a smile.

You understood only too well why it was so important to promote jury rights because:

“There is a genuine and deep-rooted feeling by defendants and lawyers alike that discrimination and institutional bias operate throughout the magistrates court system. Certainly, neither stipendiary nor lay magistrates properly reflect or represent the communities over which they preside.”

I suspect you still have JAG Griffith’s book The Politics of the Judiciary on your shelf, which makes clear that the make up of the judiciary has not improved. And yet now you wish to bestow more power to magistrates.

The argument you put forward today for removing jury rights is that you have a commitment to victims who you rightly identify are stuck in appalling court delays, as are defendants. There is a very straightforward cause of the delays. Between 2010 and 2019 over half the courts across England and Wales were closed.

I will tell you a secret. If you close a court, it can no longer hear cases and an insufferable burden is placed upon those courts who still remain. The PSC union led an excellent campaign against the closures, but it was ignored. I would imagine you too were opposed to the closures of important London courts that you practised in, such as Bow Street, Clerkenwell, and Blackfriars.

Here’s an idea as part of your commitment to victims, alongside or instead of building new prisons, why not reopen the criminal courts that were closed? That would immediately help to reduce the backlog of trials.

While you’re at it you could reduce the conveyer belt of overcharged defendants in joint enterprise murder cases, clogging up the courts.

The recent court watch report by APPEAL, Joint Enterprise on Trial, looking at 17 trials at the Old Bailey, found 7,000 days (19 years) spent on remand by defendants who were subsequently either acquitted or given a non-custodial sentence.

Finally why not, on your travels abroad, promote with pride the long British tradition of the right to a trial by jury? You could provide them with the argument in your first book, Miscarriages of Justice – Justice in Error written in 1993, made by the contributor John Jackson:

“One advantage of jury trial is that jurors are not privy to inadmissible evidence which may prejudice any tribunal of fact. Another is that the principle of random selection appears to be a better foundation for impartiality and independence than the principle of selection by unaccountable advisory committees appointed by the Lord Chancellor.”

I hope you don’t mind me setting all this out for you. It’s just you seem to have forgotten all that you learnt in your legal practice, and the unique character of the jury in protecting the freedom of the individual.

Yours sincerely,
MATT FOOT

PS. On a separate matter, can your government please make progress on scrapping the appalling 2014 law which denies miscarriage of justice victims, like Sam Hallam (alongside 93 per cent of other applicants) any compensation?

Despite being found innocent, they cannot meet a virtually insurmountable test that they must then prove their innocence beyond reasonable doubt and so are left destitute.

They too are victims who I’m sure you would also wish to support.

• Matt Foot is a criminal defence solicitor, and co-director of the legal charity APPEAL that fights wrongful convictions.