The average person excluded to make fast convictions.

Jury trials in England and Wales for crimes that carry a likely sentence of less than three years will be scrapped, the justice secretary has announced.

The reforms to the justice system include creating "swift courts" under the government's plan to tackle unprecedented delays in the court system.

Soon enough they'll just let the Sharia Law courts do everything. My how the mighty have fallen.

You may or may not know that the US has a similar system currently, where jury trials aren't an option in some criminal cases...

Jury trials are available in criminal cases involving felonies, where the sentence is potentially a year or more in prison, or serious misdemeanors, where the sentence is potentially over 6 months and up to a year in jail.

But they're not available in criminal cases involving petty misdemeanors, where the potential sentence is 6 months or less in jail, or violations, where the potential sentence is just a fine or community service. Those are handled with bench trials, where the judge listens to the evidence presented at trial and decides guilty or innocence.

(Bench trials are also an option in higher level misdemeanor cases and in felony cases, but the defendant there gets the choice of bench or jury trial.)

And another wrinkle: At least in my state, there are no jury trials in juvenile cases, even for juveniles charged with felonies or higher level misdemeanors (unless charged as an adult). Juvenile Court criminal cases only have bench trials. Though that may vary from state to state.


So even though our 6th Amendment states that you're constitutionally entitled to trial by jury, the Supreme Court has ruled over the years that this right is not absolute in all criminal cases.


Now, I don't personally know how England breaks down their criminal case classifications. So this may be something that's fairly analogous to the current US system of juries for serious but not petty crimes, or it may be more like if the US were to take away the option of a jury trial for high level misdemeanors and low level felony cases.

And regarding "swift courts", while there's not much info provided, it could be similar to what is sometimes seen in the US.

For example, when a criminal court judge gets backlogged with lengthy trials and complex hearings, they'll sometimes bring in another judge from either the same jurisdiction or an outside jurisdiction to assist them with running rapidly through the simpler cases and hearings in their backlog, like cases with plea deals, straightforward sentencings, probation revocations, basic preliminary hearings, etc. That allows the primary judge to continue to focus on working through the more serious and complex matters, while the fill-in judge powers through the simpler stuff in what's effectively "lightning round" style.

This type of system was used to help clear COVID shutdown related backlogs in my area, and I've also seen it used when a judge was out for an extended period while recovering from a car crash and was trying to get caught back up on their caseload.


Judges often also have the authority to appoint magistrates or similar, to which they can potentially delegate the handling of simpler hearings and cases, with the judge still providing judicial oversight and final approval/veto power over their decisions.


So again, I don't know what the Brits mean by "swift courts" here, but it may be analogous to what's already in practice in the US currently... Bringing in extra manpower to help power through the simpler cases in a backlog and free up more time to tackle the more serious/complex cases in a more timely manner.

Well any decent criminal defense lawyer, with a client that could get whopped with months in jail, but a crime level that the government states "no jury trial" should appeal all the way to the US Supreme Court. Threat of incarceration without an opportunity of a review by jury needs to fall. The law changes in criminal cases as the light of injustice to the citizen.

quote:

Originally posted by abnmacv:
Well any decent criminal defense lawyer, with a client that could get whopped with months in jail, but a crime level that the government states "no jury trial" should appeal all the way to the US Supreme Court.

Any decent criminal defense lawyer would know that appealing to the US Supreme Court would be futile as they would deny certiorari, since the inapplicability of trial by jury to petty cases has already been settled by the US Supreme Court in cases stretching all the way back to the 1880s, backed by even earlier common law precedence, and more recently the Supreme Court firmly established the bright line framework of "petty/no jury = <6 months, serious/jury = 6+ months" in two specific cases in the 1970s and 1980s: Baldwin v. New York, and Blanton v. North Las Vegas.

This precedent has since been tested and clarified by further cases in the 1990s-2010s, yet still stands.

quote:

Originally posted by RogueJSK:
This precedent has since been tested and clarified by further cases in the 1990s-2010s, yet still stands.

Ain’t that a fact.

I wonder what the penalty is for potentially hurting someone's feelings by shooting a firearm in another country legally and safely?