Criminal justice & punishment
Should Trial by Jury Be Abolished in Serious Criminal Cases?
LNAT Section B · Model essay
The essay prompt
Consider whether the jury should be removed from the most serious criminal trials and replaced by professional judges. Argue for a clear position.
The stance
No. Trial by jury should be retained for serious criminal cases, because its legitimacy and constitutional value outweigh its inefficiencies; the right answer to its weaknesses is targeted reform, not abolition.
The case for
Juries diffuse state power and act as a check on executive overreach.
Because guilt in the gravest cases is decided by citizens rather than by an organ of the state, the same authority that prosecutes cannot also convict. Bushell's Case (1670) entrenched this by holding that jurors cannot be punished for their verdict, and R v Ponting (1985) showed the jury refusing to convict where it judged a prosecution oppressive. Removing the jury concentrates prosecution and judgment in the hands of the state.
The case against
Modern serious trials can outstrip lay comprehension.
Complex fraud, financial and digital-evidence cases involve material that untrained jurors may struggle to follow over many weeks, raising the risk of verdicts driven by impression rather than evidence. This was the concern behind England's repeated proposals to remove juries from long fraud trials.
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