Is nothing safe beyond the insidious reach of the COVID-19 pandemic? Last month we learned our right to trial by jury (‘The lamp that shows that freedom lives’, to use the well-worn Lord Devlin quote) could be trimmed for the first time since the Old Bailey was being pummelled during the Blitz.
Has the coronavirus changed the justice system forever? asked a recent headline in The Observer. The presumption of innocence was ‘an indispensable feature of our society’ and the jury its ‘lifeblood’, wrote Jeremy Dein QC in the letters pages of the same paper. ‘It must not become another victim of this crisis.’
That twelve good men (and women) and true be hemmed in, side-by-side, on their narrow benches for weeks on end before being confined to a wood-panelled jury room for deliberations is neither a practical nor tempting prospect in the age of coronavirus. So Lord Burnett, head of judiciary in England and Wales, is considering ‘radical measures’ including cutting the number
