Who should decide if you are guilty: the state, or a group of 12 ordinary citizens?
England is now considering getting rid of jury trials for thousands of cases. It would be the biggest change to the justice system since the Middle Ages.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the law, specifically, jury trials in Britain, and their future.
[00:00:32] The role of jury trials is a subject of ongoing debate, and the law might well be changing, so today we're going to look at the unusual idea and the uneven history of the jury, and at how twelve strangers with no legal training can decide whether someone is guilty or not guilty.
[00:00:55] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:01] Imagine you are charged with a crime in England today. Not a minor traffic offence. Something serious. Fraud, perhaps, or assault. You maintain that you are innocent. You are certain you can prove it.
[00:01:18] And of course, you are innocent. You listen to this show, which means you are an upstanding, law-abiding member of society. But somehow, somewhere, you've been accused and charged with a crime.
[00:01:34] Your lawyer tells you to expect your case to come to court in approximately three years. Possibly four. Some cases, he tells you, are now being scheduled to start in 2029.
[00:01:51] Until then, you'll just need to sit tight. The possible verdict will be hanging over you. It will be the first thing you think about when you wake up, and the last thought you have before you go to sleep every night.
[00:02:06] This is the reality of the Crown Court system in England and Wales in 2026. There are more than 78,000 cases waiting to be heard. The backlog — the number of cases sitting in this queue — has roughly doubled since before the pandemic. And it is still growing.
[00:02:31] And let's say you are the victim of a crime. It's the same wait, just from the other side. You might have to wait two, three, even four years until you can have some kind of closure. And all that time, the person accused may still be walking free.
[00:02:53] Some victims, perfectly understandably, wait so long for their day in court that they simply give up and drop the charges.
[00:03:03] The government's response, which was announced earlier this year by the Justice Secretary David Lammy, is radical.
[00:03:12] The basic idea is to reduce the number of cases going to a jury trial, and to reserve jury trials more clearly for the most serious offences.
[00:03:25] The Courts and Tribunals Bill, which is working its way through Parliament as this episode is being recorded, would remove the rights of defendants to elect a jury trial for what are called “either-way offences” — things like fraud, robbery, and certain drug offences.
[00:03:46] These are offences that are serious enough to go to the Crown Court but not the most serious crimes. At the moment, a defendant charged with an either-way offence can choose whether to be tried by magistrates — who sit without a jury — or by a jury in the Crown Court.
[00:04:09] That choice, the government says, must go.
[00:04:13] And it's worth being clear about what this proposal does not include. Murder. Rape. Terrorism. Grievous bodily harm. Nobody in government is suggesting that the most serious crimes should be tried without a jury. The proposal is specifically about this middle tier of offences, for now at least. Now, the legal community in Britain is, to put it mildly, alarmed.
[00:04:43] Lawyers, barristers, and legal academics have all come out strongly against the bill, with many arguing that the right to a jury trial is a fundamental safeguard against the overreach of the state. It exists for a reason, they say, and is one of the foundations of a just and fair society.
[00:05:08] So, is it really? Where does the idea of jury service come from? How is it used, and what are some of the most famous cases of juries in action?
[00:05:20] Well, let’s start with what a jury trial actually is, because it might be quite an unfamiliar concept, especially if you come from a country with a civil-law system.
[00:05:35] In England, when you are charged with a serious criminal offence, your guilt or innocence is decided not by a judge, but by a jury.
[00:05:48] A jury is a group of twelve ordinary citizens, chosen at random, who are called to sit in court and listen to the evidence presented by both sides.
[00:06:02] At the end of the trial, they retire — they leave the courtroom and deliberate together in private — and they return with a verdict. Guilty, or not guilty.
[00:06:17] The judge's job is to oversee the proceedings, to advise the jury on points of law, and if the verdict comes back guilty, they will decide on the appropriate punishment, based on the severity of the crime.
[00:06:34] But the central factual question — did this person commit this crime? — this is answered by the twelve random strangers pulled in off the street. Or rather, not literally pulled in off the street, but chosen at random from the electoral roll.
[00:06:55] This is what lawyers call the adversarial system.
[00:06:59] Two sides — the prosecution and the defence — present their cases to a neutral decision-maker.
[00:07:07] It's quite different from the more inquisitorial system used in France, Germany, and most of continental Europe, where the judge takes a far more active role in investigating the facts, and where ordinary citizens play a much smaller part.
[00:07:26] And this jury system, and the principle behind it, goes back a very long way.
[00:07:34] The first jury-like systems we know of appeared in ancient Athens, around the sixth century BC. Athenian citizens could be called to serve as dikastai — citizen judges — who would hear arguments and decide cases by majority vote.
[00:07:54] Sometimes there were hundreds of them sitting on a single trial. The most famous example is the trial of Socrates in 399 BC, in which five hundred citizens voted to condemn him to death. It was, in some ways, the first great jury trial. And it produced one of history's most controversial verdicts.
[00:08:19] The English jury, however, developed much later.
[00:08:24] In etymological terms, as the keen linguists among you might have guessed, the English word "jury" comes from the Old French "juré," meaning "sworn" — those who have taken an oath, who have made a promise.
[00:08:43] What the English did was formalise it. In 1166, King Henry II issued what is called the Assize of Clarendon. It required that in each district, twelve local men of good standing should be assembled to report on crimes and settle disputes.
[00:09:04] This was not yet the modern jury as we know it today, but it established the principle: twelve local people, deciding together.
[00:09:15] Then, in 1215, came Magna Carta — the great document forced on King John by his barons. It contains a clause that has shaped the law ever since: "No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, or dispossessed, except by the lawful judgement of his equals."
[00:09:40] The important idea there is not the exact modern mechanism, but the principle behind it: that justice should not simply be the arbitrary will of the ruler. The lawful judgement of "his equals" — people like him. Peers judging peers.
[00:10:00] So when the British government talks about removing jury trials for a large category of offences, it's not proposing a minor administrative tweak. It's proposing to dismantle a mechanism of justice that has existed, in some form, for over eight hundred years.
[00:10:21] Now, if you live in a country where the legal system doesn't use juries, you might be thinking: why would you need them?
[00:10:31] It's a perfectly reasonable question to ask: why use ordinary people at all?
[00:10:37] Why not have a judge decide every case? After all, they are a professional, trained in the law, experienced in weighing evidence.
[00:10:47] The answer is about power.
[00:10:50] A judge is appointed by the state. They work within the system. They have a career to protect and professional instincts shaped by years inside the legal establishment.
[00:11:04] A jury is none of those things. It is twelve people chosen at random, with no career to protect, no deference to authority, and no obligation to the government.
[00:11:18] That randomness is the point. You cannot bribe, pressurise or intimidate twelve strangers before they walk into the room, because you do not know who they are.
[00:11:30] A single judge, however, is a known quantity. If a government wants to convict someone, a judge is a far easier target than a jury.
[00:11:44] There is also something important about legitimacy.
[00:11:48] When a jury convicts someone, the wider community can see that the verdict came from ordinary people — people like them. It was not handed down by a distant official.
[00:12:03] Yes, it can be slow and frustrating, but for the most part, it works. Twelve people need to be sufficiently convinced, based on the evidence they have seen, that someone is either guilty or not guilty.
[00:12:21] Sometimes, however, a jury does something unexpected. It acquits someone who is, by any technical reading of the law, guilty.
[00:12:32] Lawyers call this jury nullification.
[00:12:37] It is the power of a jury to refuse to convict even when the facts seem clear, because the jurors believe that convicting would produce an unjust result.
[00:12:51] The law says he did it; we say it doesn't matter. We'll come to a few examples of this in a minute.
[00:12:59] Now, the most famous jury trial in living memory is probably the OJ Simpson case, in 1995.
[00:13:09] You might know this story already, and if you're a member, you might remember it from episode number 409.
[00:13:18] But as a quick reminder, the former American football star was acquitted of murdering his ex-wife, who was found not guilty, despite overwhelming physical evidence against him.
[00:13:32] Now, rather than revisit that case, let me tell you about a few lesser-known cases — because they show something more specific about how the system actually works.
[00:13:46] The first dates from 1670, when the principle of jury nullification was established in England. This is the case of William Penn, the man who would later found the colony of Pennsylvania in America.
[00:14:03] Now, Penn was a Quaker preacher. He was accused of holding what was called an unlawful religious assembly — in other words, preaching publicly in a way that the authorities said was illegal.
[00:14:19] Penn was clearly guilty under the law.
[00:14:24] But the jury refused to convict him. The judge was furious.
[00:14:30] He locked the jurors up without food or drink to force a guilty verdict.
[00:14:36] They still refused. A higher court eventually ruled that a jury could not be punished for its verdict, whatever that verdict might be.
[00:14:46] And that principle has remained ever since.
[00:14:51] Now, fast-forward three centuries. It is February 1985, and a man named Clive Ponting is sitting in the dock at the Old Bailey — London's most famous criminal court.
[00:15:07] Ponting is a senior civil servant at the Ministry of Defence.
[00:15:13] He has leaked classified documents to a Labour Member of Parliament — documents that revealed the Argentine Navy ship General Belgrano had been sailing away from the British exclusion zone when it was sunk during the Falklands War, killing 323 Argentine sailors.
[00:15:36] Importantly, the Conservative government had told Parliament something quite different.
[00:15:44] Ponting is charged under the Official Secrets Act. He is, on the face of it, obviously guilty. He admits leaking the documents. The judge, summing up, tells the jury that "the interests of the state" are the same as the interests of the government, and directs them accordingly.
[00:16:08] The jury retires. It comes back with a verdict of not guilty.
[00:16:16] The government is furious.
[00:16:19] But the jury had evidently decided that telling Parliament the truth about the deaths of 323 people was not a crime worth punishing.
[00:16:32] And this theme has continued to the modern day. In January 2022, four defendants appear before a jury at Bristol Crown Court, charged with criminal damage. They had pulled down the statue of Edward Colston, an eighteenth-century slave trader, during the Black Lives Matter protests of June 2020, and they had thrown the statue into Bristol harbour. They do not deny doing it. The footage exists.
[00:17:07] The jury finds them not guilty, by eleven votes to one.
[00:17:14] The then Justice Secretary was furious. And so were many members of the public.
[00:17:21] Others pointed out that the jury had done exactly what juries are meant to do: reach a verdict the jurors considered just, based on the full circumstances of the case.
[00:17:35] Critics, however, argued that this looked uncomfortably close to jurors overriding the law because they sympathised with the defendants.
[00:17:47] This sparked a fierce debate over the role of juries: should juries be allowed, in effect, to rewrite the law through their verdicts, or is that unpredictability precisely part of their constitutional function?
[00:18:04] Now, you may have strong views on this, but what is clear is that these cases make an argument for juries that no efficiency review ever will. The government couldn't predict how any of those juries would vote. That uncertainty — that independence from the state — that is exactly what the bill would start to erode.
[00:18:30] No longer would twelve strangers be responsible for deciding whether someone is guilty. That responsibility would instead fall to magistrates or a judge.
[00:18:43] Now, the government is not necessarily saying that this is a better system in terms of fairness; its argument is primarily practical. The backlog is over 78,000 cases and growing, with official modelling suggesting it could rise to 200,000 by 2035.
[00:19:06] Victims are waiting years. Fewer jury trials, so the argument goes, will be faster and cheaper, and will allow the most serious cases to receive jury trials without the same years-long wait.
[00:19:23] But the counterargument is powerful.
[00:19:27] The value of the jury lies precisely in its awkwardness — the fact that it's slow, unpredictable, and answerable to no one. A state that can imprison its citizens without needing to persuade ordinary members of the public is a state with considerably more concentrated power.
[00:19:50] And then there is the slippery slope argument.
[00:19:54] The current proposal is careful to exclude the most serious crimes. But the critics' concern is not really about where the line is drawn today. It's about what happens once you accept that the line can be moved at all.
[00:20:12] Once you establish that efficiency can override eight hundred years of constitutional principle, the question is: how far?
[00:20:22] A government that reduces jury rights for fraud and robbery has already won the argument in principle. What stops a future government from extending that logic to other offences, if a new backlog develops, or a new pressure emerges?
[00:20:39] A poll in 2025 found that fifty-four per cent of people in Britain would prefer to be tried by a jury if accused of a crime. Even knowing all the delays and imperfections, a majority of the population trusts twelve strangers more than it trusts a single judge.
[00:21:02] And that, perhaps, is the most important thing to understand about jury service. It is not simply a mechanism for producing verdicts. It is an expression of a belief — the belief that ordinary citizens, and not the state, should have the final say over whether one of their number is imprisoned.
[00:21:25] Britain is debating whether to give that up, and, in so doing, is asking whether eight centuries of constitutional principle are really worth sacrificing for the sake of clearing an administrative backlog.
[00:21:42] OK then, that is it for today's episode on jury trials.
[00:21:46] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:21:50] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:21:53] Do juries exist in your country? If so, how do they work? And are there similar proposals to change them?
[00:22:02] Let me know in the comments below, if you're listening to this somewhere where you can comment, and for the members among you, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:16] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:22:21] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the law, specifically, jury trials in Britain, and their future.
[00:00:32] The role of jury trials is a subject of ongoing debate, and the law might well be changing, so today we're going to look at the unusual idea and the uneven history of the jury, and at how twelve strangers with no legal training can decide whether someone is guilty or not guilty.
[00:00:55] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:01] Imagine you are charged with a crime in England today. Not a minor traffic offence. Something serious. Fraud, perhaps, or assault. You maintain that you are innocent. You are certain you can prove it.
[00:01:18] And of course, you are innocent. You listen to this show, which means you are an upstanding, law-abiding member of society. But somehow, somewhere, you've been accused and charged with a crime.
[00:01:34] Your lawyer tells you to expect your case to come to court in approximately three years. Possibly four. Some cases, he tells you, are now being scheduled to start in 2029.
[00:01:51] Until then, you'll just need to sit tight. The possible verdict will be hanging over you. It will be the first thing you think about when you wake up, and the last thought you have before you go to sleep every night.
[00:02:06] This is the reality of the Crown Court system in England and Wales in 2026. There are more than 78,000 cases waiting to be heard. The backlog — the number of cases sitting in this queue — has roughly doubled since before the pandemic. And it is still growing.
[00:02:31] And let's say you are the victim of a crime. It's the same wait, just from the other side. You might have to wait two, three, even four years until you can have some kind of closure. And all that time, the person accused may still be walking free.
[00:02:53] Some victims, perfectly understandably, wait so long for their day in court that they simply give up and drop the charges.
[00:03:03] The government's response, which was announced earlier this year by the Justice Secretary David Lammy, is radical.
[00:03:12] The basic idea is to reduce the number of cases going to a jury trial, and to reserve jury trials more clearly for the most serious offences.
[00:03:25] The Courts and Tribunals Bill, which is working its way through Parliament as this episode is being recorded, would remove the rights of defendants to elect a jury trial for what are called “either-way offences” — things like fraud, robbery, and certain drug offences.
[00:03:46] These are offences that are serious enough to go to the Crown Court but not the most serious crimes. At the moment, a defendant charged with an either-way offence can choose whether to be tried by magistrates — who sit without a jury — or by a jury in the Crown Court.
[00:04:09] That choice, the government says, must go.
[00:04:13] And it's worth being clear about what this proposal does not include. Murder. Rape. Terrorism. Grievous bodily harm. Nobody in government is suggesting that the most serious crimes should be tried without a jury. The proposal is specifically about this middle tier of offences, for now at least. Now, the legal community in Britain is, to put it mildly, alarmed.
[00:04:43] Lawyers, barristers, and legal academics have all come out strongly against the bill, with many arguing that the right to a jury trial is a fundamental safeguard against the overreach of the state. It exists for a reason, they say, and is one of the foundations of a just and fair society.
[00:05:08] So, is it really? Where does the idea of jury service come from? How is it used, and what are some of the most famous cases of juries in action?
[00:05:20] Well, let’s start with what a jury trial actually is, because it might be quite an unfamiliar concept, especially if you come from a country with a civil-law system.
[00:05:35] In England, when you are charged with a serious criminal offence, your guilt or innocence is decided not by a judge, but by a jury.
[00:05:48] A jury is a group of twelve ordinary citizens, chosen at random, who are called to sit in court and listen to the evidence presented by both sides.
[00:06:02] At the end of the trial, they retire — they leave the courtroom and deliberate together in private — and they return with a verdict. Guilty, or not guilty.
[00:06:17] The judge's job is to oversee the proceedings, to advise the jury on points of law, and if the verdict comes back guilty, they will decide on the appropriate punishment, based on the severity of the crime.
[00:06:34] But the central factual question — did this person commit this crime? — this is answered by the twelve random strangers pulled in off the street. Or rather, not literally pulled in off the street, but chosen at random from the electoral roll.
[00:06:55] This is what lawyers call the adversarial system.
[00:06:59] Two sides — the prosecution and the defence — present their cases to a neutral decision-maker.
[00:07:07] It's quite different from the more inquisitorial system used in France, Germany, and most of continental Europe, where the judge takes a far more active role in investigating the facts, and where ordinary citizens play a much smaller part.
[00:07:26] And this jury system, and the principle behind it, goes back a very long way.
[00:07:34] The first jury-like systems we know of appeared in ancient Athens, around the sixth century BC. Athenian citizens could be called to serve as dikastai — citizen judges — who would hear arguments and decide cases by majority vote.
[00:07:54] Sometimes there were hundreds of them sitting on a single trial. The most famous example is the trial of Socrates in 399 BC, in which five hundred citizens voted to condemn him to death. It was, in some ways, the first great jury trial. And it produced one of history's most controversial verdicts.
[00:08:19] The English jury, however, developed much later.
[00:08:24] In etymological terms, as the keen linguists among you might have guessed, the English word "jury" comes from the Old French "juré," meaning "sworn" — those who have taken an oath, who have made a promise.
[00:08:43] What the English did was formalise it. In 1166, King Henry II issued what is called the Assize of Clarendon. It required that in each district, twelve local men of good standing should be assembled to report on crimes and settle disputes.
[00:09:04] This was not yet the modern jury as we know it today, but it established the principle: twelve local people, deciding together.
[00:09:15] Then, in 1215, came Magna Carta — the great document forced on King John by his barons. It contains a clause that has shaped the law ever since: "No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, or dispossessed, except by the lawful judgement of his equals."
[00:09:40] The important idea there is not the exact modern mechanism, but the principle behind it: that justice should not simply be the arbitrary will of the ruler. The lawful judgement of "his equals" — people like him. Peers judging peers.
[00:10:00] So when the British government talks about removing jury trials for a large category of offences, it's not proposing a minor administrative tweak. It's proposing to dismantle a mechanism of justice that has existed, in some form, for over eight hundred years.
[00:10:21] Now, if you live in a country where the legal system doesn't use juries, you might be thinking: why would you need them?
[00:10:31] It's a perfectly reasonable question to ask: why use ordinary people at all?
[00:10:37] Why not have a judge decide every case? After all, they are a professional, trained in the law, experienced in weighing evidence.
[00:10:47] The answer is about power.
[00:10:50] A judge is appointed by the state. They work within the system. They have a career to protect and professional instincts shaped by years inside the legal establishment.
[00:11:04] A jury is none of those things. It is twelve people chosen at random, with no career to protect, no deference to authority, and no obligation to the government.
[00:11:18] That randomness is the point. You cannot bribe, pressurise or intimidate twelve strangers before they walk into the room, because you do not know who they are.
[00:11:30] A single judge, however, is a known quantity. If a government wants to convict someone, a judge is a far easier target than a jury.
[00:11:44] There is also something important about legitimacy.
[00:11:48] When a jury convicts someone, the wider community can see that the verdict came from ordinary people — people like them. It was not handed down by a distant official.
[00:12:03] Yes, it can be slow and frustrating, but for the most part, it works. Twelve people need to be sufficiently convinced, based on the evidence they have seen, that someone is either guilty or not guilty.
[00:12:21] Sometimes, however, a jury does something unexpected. It acquits someone who is, by any technical reading of the law, guilty.
[00:12:32] Lawyers call this jury nullification.
[00:12:37] It is the power of a jury to refuse to convict even when the facts seem clear, because the jurors believe that convicting would produce an unjust result.
[00:12:51] The law says he did it; we say it doesn't matter. We'll come to a few examples of this in a minute.
[00:12:59] Now, the most famous jury trial in living memory is probably the OJ Simpson case, in 1995.
[00:13:09] You might know this story already, and if you're a member, you might remember it from episode number 409.
[00:13:18] But as a quick reminder, the former American football star was acquitted of murdering his ex-wife, who was found not guilty, despite overwhelming physical evidence against him.
[00:13:32] Now, rather than revisit that case, let me tell you about a few lesser-known cases — because they show something more specific about how the system actually works.
[00:13:46] The first dates from 1670, when the principle of jury nullification was established in England. This is the case of William Penn, the man who would later found the colony of Pennsylvania in America.
[00:14:03] Now, Penn was a Quaker preacher. He was accused of holding what was called an unlawful religious assembly — in other words, preaching publicly in a way that the authorities said was illegal.
[00:14:19] Penn was clearly guilty under the law.
[00:14:24] But the jury refused to convict him. The judge was furious.
[00:14:30] He locked the jurors up without food or drink to force a guilty verdict.
[00:14:36] They still refused. A higher court eventually ruled that a jury could not be punished for its verdict, whatever that verdict might be.
[00:14:46] And that principle has remained ever since.
[00:14:51] Now, fast-forward three centuries. It is February 1985, and a man named Clive Ponting is sitting in the dock at the Old Bailey — London's most famous criminal court.
[00:15:07] Ponting is a senior civil servant at the Ministry of Defence.
[00:15:13] He has leaked classified documents to a Labour Member of Parliament — documents that revealed the Argentine Navy ship General Belgrano had been sailing away from the British exclusion zone when it was sunk during the Falklands War, killing 323 Argentine sailors.
[00:15:36] Importantly, the Conservative government had told Parliament something quite different.
[00:15:44] Ponting is charged under the Official Secrets Act. He is, on the face of it, obviously guilty. He admits leaking the documents. The judge, summing up, tells the jury that "the interests of the state" are the same as the interests of the government, and directs them accordingly.
[00:16:08] The jury retires. It comes back with a verdict of not guilty.
[00:16:16] The government is furious.
[00:16:19] But the jury had evidently decided that telling Parliament the truth about the deaths of 323 people was not a crime worth punishing.
[00:16:32] And this theme has continued to the modern day. In January 2022, four defendants appear before a jury at Bristol Crown Court, charged with criminal damage. They had pulled down the statue of Edward Colston, an eighteenth-century slave trader, during the Black Lives Matter protests of June 2020, and they had thrown the statue into Bristol harbour. They do not deny doing it. The footage exists.
[00:17:07] The jury finds them not guilty, by eleven votes to one.
[00:17:14] The then Justice Secretary was furious. And so were many members of the public.
[00:17:21] Others pointed out that the jury had done exactly what juries are meant to do: reach a verdict the jurors considered just, based on the full circumstances of the case.
[00:17:35] Critics, however, argued that this looked uncomfortably close to jurors overriding the law because they sympathised with the defendants.
[00:17:47] This sparked a fierce debate over the role of juries: should juries be allowed, in effect, to rewrite the law through their verdicts, or is that unpredictability precisely part of their constitutional function?
[00:18:04] Now, you may have strong views on this, but what is clear is that these cases make an argument for juries that no efficiency review ever will. The government couldn't predict how any of those juries would vote. That uncertainty — that independence from the state — that is exactly what the bill would start to erode.
[00:18:30] No longer would twelve strangers be responsible for deciding whether someone is guilty. That responsibility would instead fall to magistrates or a judge.
[00:18:43] Now, the government is not necessarily saying that this is a better system in terms of fairness; its argument is primarily practical. The backlog is over 78,000 cases and growing, with official modelling suggesting it could rise to 200,000 by 2035.
[00:19:06] Victims are waiting years. Fewer jury trials, so the argument goes, will be faster and cheaper, and will allow the most serious cases to receive jury trials without the same years-long wait.
[00:19:23] But the counterargument is powerful.
[00:19:27] The value of the jury lies precisely in its awkwardness — the fact that it's slow, unpredictable, and answerable to no one. A state that can imprison its citizens without needing to persuade ordinary members of the public is a state with considerably more concentrated power.
[00:19:50] And then there is the slippery slope argument.
[00:19:54] The current proposal is careful to exclude the most serious crimes. But the critics' concern is not really about where the line is drawn today. It's about what happens once you accept that the line can be moved at all.
[00:20:12] Once you establish that efficiency can override eight hundred years of constitutional principle, the question is: how far?
[00:20:22] A government that reduces jury rights for fraud and robbery has already won the argument in principle. What stops a future government from extending that logic to other offences, if a new backlog develops, or a new pressure emerges?
[00:20:39] A poll in 2025 found that fifty-four per cent of people in Britain would prefer to be tried by a jury if accused of a crime. Even knowing all the delays and imperfections, a majority of the population trusts twelve strangers more than it trusts a single judge.
[00:21:02] And that, perhaps, is the most important thing to understand about jury service. It is not simply a mechanism for producing verdicts. It is an expression of a belief — the belief that ordinary citizens, and not the state, should have the final say over whether one of their number is imprisoned.
[00:21:25] Britain is debating whether to give that up, and, in so doing, is asking whether eight centuries of constitutional principle are really worth sacrificing for the sake of clearing an administrative backlog.
[00:21:42] OK then, that is it for today's episode on jury trials.
[00:21:46] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:21:50] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:21:53] Do juries exist in your country? If so, how do they work? And are there similar proposals to change them?
[00:22:02] Let me know in the comments below, if you're listening to this somewhere where you can comment, and for the members among you, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:16] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:22:21] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the law, specifically, jury trials in Britain, and their future.
[00:00:32] The role of jury trials is a subject of ongoing debate, and the law might well be changing, so today we're going to look at the unusual idea and the uneven history of the jury, and at how twelve strangers with no legal training can decide whether someone is guilty or not guilty.
[00:00:55] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:01] Imagine you are charged with a crime in England today. Not a minor traffic offence. Something serious. Fraud, perhaps, or assault. You maintain that you are innocent. You are certain you can prove it.
[00:01:18] And of course, you are innocent. You listen to this show, which means you are an upstanding, law-abiding member of society. But somehow, somewhere, you've been accused and charged with a crime.
[00:01:34] Your lawyer tells you to expect your case to come to court in approximately three years. Possibly four. Some cases, he tells you, are now being scheduled to start in 2029.
[00:01:51] Until then, you'll just need to sit tight. The possible verdict will be hanging over you. It will be the first thing you think about when you wake up, and the last thought you have before you go to sleep every night.
[00:02:06] This is the reality of the Crown Court system in England and Wales in 2026. There are more than 78,000 cases waiting to be heard. The backlog — the number of cases sitting in this queue — has roughly doubled since before the pandemic. And it is still growing.
[00:02:31] And let's say you are the victim of a crime. It's the same wait, just from the other side. You might have to wait two, three, even four years until you can have some kind of closure. And all that time, the person accused may still be walking free.
[00:02:53] Some victims, perfectly understandably, wait so long for their day in court that they simply give up and drop the charges.
[00:03:03] The government's response, which was announced earlier this year by the Justice Secretary David Lammy, is radical.
[00:03:12] The basic idea is to reduce the number of cases going to a jury trial, and to reserve jury trials more clearly for the most serious offences.
[00:03:25] The Courts and Tribunals Bill, which is working its way through Parliament as this episode is being recorded, would remove the rights of defendants to elect a jury trial for what are called “either-way offences” — things like fraud, robbery, and certain drug offences.
[00:03:46] These are offences that are serious enough to go to the Crown Court but not the most serious crimes. At the moment, a defendant charged with an either-way offence can choose whether to be tried by magistrates — who sit without a jury — or by a jury in the Crown Court.
[00:04:09] That choice, the government says, must go.
[00:04:13] And it's worth being clear about what this proposal does not include. Murder. Rape. Terrorism. Grievous bodily harm. Nobody in government is suggesting that the most serious crimes should be tried without a jury. The proposal is specifically about this middle tier of offences, for now at least. Now, the legal community in Britain is, to put it mildly, alarmed.
[00:04:43] Lawyers, barristers, and legal academics have all come out strongly against the bill, with many arguing that the right to a jury trial is a fundamental safeguard against the overreach of the state. It exists for a reason, they say, and is one of the foundations of a just and fair society.
[00:05:08] So, is it really? Where does the idea of jury service come from? How is it used, and what are some of the most famous cases of juries in action?
[00:05:20] Well, let’s start with what a jury trial actually is, because it might be quite an unfamiliar concept, especially if you come from a country with a civil-law system.
[00:05:35] In England, when you are charged with a serious criminal offence, your guilt or innocence is decided not by a judge, but by a jury.
[00:05:48] A jury is a group of twelve ordinary citizens, chosen at random, who are called to sit in court and listen to the evidence presented by both sides.
[00:06:02] At the end of the trial, they retire — they leave the courtroom and deliberate together in private — and they return with a verdict. Guilty, or not guilty.
[00:06:17] The judge's job is to oversee the proceedings, to advise the jury on points of law, and if the verdict comes back guilty, they will decide on the appropriate punishment, based on the severity of the crime.
[00:06:34] But the central factual question — did this person commit this crime? — this is answered by the twelve random strangers pulled in off the street. Or rather, not literally pulled in off the street, but chosen at random from the electoral roll.
[00:06:55] This is what lawyers call the adversarial system.
[00:06:59] Two sides — the prosecution and the defence — present their cases to a neutral decision-maker.
[00:07:07] It's quite different from the more inquisitorial system used in France, Germany, and most of continental Europe, where the judge takes a far more active role in investigating the facts, and where ordinary citizens play a much smaller part.
[00:07:26] And this jury system, and the principle behind it, goes back a very long way.
[00:07:34] The first jury-like systems we know of appeared in ancient Athens, around the sixth century BC. Athenian citizens could be called to serve as dikastai — citizen judges — who would hear arguments and decide cases by majority vote.
[00:07:54] Sometimes there were hundreds of them sitting on a single trial. The most famous example is the trial of Socrates in 399 BC, in which five hundred citizens voted to condemn him to death. It was, in some ways, the first great jury trial. And it produced one of history's most controversial verdicts.
[00:08:19] The English jury, however, developed much later.
[00:08:24] In etymological terms, as the keen linguists among you might have guessed, the English word "jury" comes from the Old French "juré," meaning "sworn" — those who have taken an oath, who have made a promise.
[00:08:43] What the English did was formalise it. In 1166, King Henry II issued what is called the Assize of Clarendon. It required that in each district, twelve local men of good standing should be assembled to report on crimes and settle disputes.
[00:09:04] This was not yet the modern jury as we know it today, but it established the principle: twelve local people, deciding together.
[00:09:15] Then, in 1215, came Magna Carta — the great document forced on King John by his barons. It contains a clause that has shaped the law ever since: "No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, or dispossessed, except by the lawful judgement of his equals."
[00:09:40] The important idea there is not the exact modern mechanism, but the principle behind it: that justice should not simply be the arbitrary will of the ruler. The lawful judgement of "his equals" — people like him. Peers judging peers.
[00:10:00] So when the British government talks about removing jury trials for a large category of offences, it's not proposing a minor administrative tweak. It's proposing to dismantle a mechanism of justice that has existed, in some form, for over eight hundred years.
[00:10:21] Now, if you live in a country where the legal system doesn't use juries, you might be thinking: why would you need them?
[00:10:31] It's a perfectly reasonable question to ask: why use ordinary people at all?
[00:10:37] Why not have a judge decide every case? After all, they are a professional, trained in the law, experienced in weighing evidence.
[00:10:47] The answer is about power.
[00:10:50] A judge is appointed by the state. They work within the system. They have a career to protect and professional instincts shaped by years inside the legal establishment.
[00:11:04] A jury is none of those things. It is twelve people chosen at random, with no career to protect, no deference to authority, and no obligation to the government.
[00:11:18] That randomness is the point. You cannot bribe, pressurise or intimidate twelve strangers before they walk into the room, because you do not know who they are.
[00:11:30] A single judge, however, is a known quantity. If a government wants to convict someone, a judge is a far easier target than a jury.
[00:11:44] There is also something important about legitimacy.
[00:11:48] When a jury convicts someone, the wider community can see that the verdict came from ordinary people — people like them. It was not handed down by a distant official.
[00:12:03] Yes, it can be slow and frustrating, but for the most part, it works. Twelve people need to be sufficiently convinced, based on the evidence they have seen, that someone is either guilty or not guilty.
[00:12:21] Sometimes, however, a jury does something unexpected. It acquits someone who is, by any technical reading of the law, guilty.
[00:12:32] Lawyers call this jury nullification.
[00:12:37] It is the power of a jury to refuse to convict even when the facts seem clear, because the jurors believe that convicting would produce an unjust result.
[00:12:51] The law says he did it; we say it doesn't matter. We'll come to a few examples of this in a minute.
[00:12:59] Now, the most famous jury trial in living memory is probably the OJ Simpson case, in 1995.
[00:13:09] You might know this story already, and if you're a member, you might remember it from episode number 409.
[00:13:18] But as a quick reminder, the former American football star was acquitted of murdering his ex-wife, who was found not guilty, despite overwhelming physical evidence against him.
[00:13:32] Now, rather than revisit that case, let me tell you about a few lesser-known cases — because they show something more specific about how the system actually works.
[00:13:46] The first dates from 1670, when the principle of jury nullification was established in England. This is the case of William Penn, the man who would later found the colony of Pennsylvania in America.
[00:14:03] Now, Penn was a Quaker preacher. He was accused of holding what was called an unlawful religious assembly — in other words, preaching publicly in a way that the authorities said was illegal.
[00:14:19] Penn was clearly guilty under the law.
[00:14:24] But the jury refused to convict him. The judge was furious.
[00:14:30] He locked the jurors up without food or drink to force a guilty verdict.
[00:14:36] They still refused. A higher court eventually ruled that a jury could not be punished for its verdict, whatever that verdict might be.
[00:14:46] And that principle has remained ever since.
[00:14:51] Now, fast-forward three centuries. It is February 1985, and a man named Clive Ponting is sitting in the dock at the Old Bailey — London's most famous criminal court.
[00:15:07] Ponting is a senior civil servant at the Ministry of Defence.
[00:15:13] He has leaked classified documents to a Labour Member of Parliament — documents that revealed the Argentine Navy ship General Belgrano had been sailing away from the British exclusion zone when it was sunk during the Falklands War, killing 323 Argentine sailors.
[00:15:36] Importantly, the Conservative government had told Parliament something quite different.
[00:15:44] Ponting is charged under the Official Secrets Act. He is, on the face of it, obviously guilty. He admits leaking the documents. The judge, summing up, tells the jury that "the interests of the state" are the same as the interests of the government, and directs them accordingly.
[00:16:08] The jury retires. It comes back with a verdict of not guilty.
[00:16:16] The government is furious.
[00:16:19] But the jury had evidently decided that telling Parliament the truth about the deaths of 323 people was not a crime worth punishing.
[00:16:32] And this theme has continued to the modern day. In January 2022, four defendants appear before a jury at Bristol Crown Court, charged with criminal damage. They had pulled down the statue of Edward Colston, an eighteenth-century slave trader, during the Black Lives Matter protests of June 2020, and they had thrown the statue into Bristol harbour. They do not deny doing it. The footage exists.
[00:17:07] The jury finds them not guilty, by eleven votes to one.
[00:17:14] The then Justice Secretary was furious. And so were many members of the public.
[00:17:21] Others pointed out that the jury had done exactly what juries are meant to do: reach a verdict the jurors considered just, based on the full circumstances of the case.
[00:17:35] Critics, however, argued that this looked uncomfortably close to jurors overriding the law because they sympathised with the defendants.
[00:17:47] This sparked a fierce debate over the role of juries: should juries be allowed, in effect, to rewrite the law through their verdicts, or is that unpredictability precisely part of their constitutional function?
[00:18:04] Now, you may have strong views on this, but what is clear is that these cases make an argument for juries that no efficiency review ever will. The government couldn't predict how any of those juries would vote. That uncertainty — that independence from the state — that is exactly what the bill would start to erode.
[00:18:30] No longer would twelve strangers be responsible for deciding whether someone is guilty. That responsibility would instead fall to magistrates or a judge.
[00:18:43] Now, the government is not necessarily saying that this is a better system in terms of fairness; its argument is primarily practical. The backlog is over 78,000 cases and growing, with official modelling suggesting it could rise to 200,000 by 2035.
[00:19:06] Victims are waiting years. Fewer jury trials, so the argument goes, will be faster and cheaper, and will allow the most serious cases to receive jury trials without the same years-long wait.
[00:19:23] But the counterargument is powerful.
[00:19:27] The value of the jury lies precisely in its awkwardness — the fact that it's slow, unpredictable, and answerable to no one. A state that can imprison its citizens without needing to persuade ordinary members of the public is a state with considerably more concentrated power.
[00:19:50] And then there is the slippery slope argument.
[00:19:54] The current proposal is careful to exclude the most serious crimes. But the critics' concern is not really about where the line is drawn today. It's about what happens once you accept that the line can be moved at all.
[00:20:12] Once you establish that efficiency can override eight hundred years of constitutional principle, the question is: how far?
[00:20:22] A government that reduces jury rights for fraud and robbery has already won the argument in principle. What stops a future government from extending that logic to other offences, if a new backlog develops, or a new pressure emerges?
[00:20:39] A poll in 2025 found that fifty-four per cent of people in Britain would prefer to be tried by a jury if accused of a crime. Even knowing all the delays and imperfections, a majority of the population trusts twelve strangers more than it trusts a single judge.
[00:21:02] And that, perhaps, is the most important thing to understand about jury service. It is not simply a mechanism for producing verdicts. It is an expression of a belief — the belief that ordinary citizens, and not the state, should have the final say over whether one of their number is imprisoned.
[00:21:25] Britain is debating whether to give that up, and, in so doing, is asking whether eight centuries of constitutional principle are really worth sacrificing for the sake of clearing an administrative backlog.
[00:21:42] OK then, that is it for today's episode on jury trials.
[00:21:46] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:21:50] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:21:53] Do juries exist in your country? If so, how do they work? And are there similar proposals to change them?
[00:22:02] Let me know in the comments below, if you're listening to this somewhere where you can comment, and for the members among you, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:16] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:22:21] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
