Juries are under attack. Earlier this month, France removed juries from most rape trials, despite heavy resistance from the judiciary. All cases involving crimes with maximum sentences of between 15 and 20 years will now be tried by courts of five judges, rather than the previous three judges and six jurors.
Similar measures are being proposed in Scotland. In 2021, the senior Scottish law officer, Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain, suggested that politicians were ‘morally obliged’ to consider judge-led trials in rape cases, in order to deal with a backlog from the Covid pandemic. This followed proposals by a senior Scottish lawyer earlier that year, who argued that more rape cases should be heard by a single judge with no jury. This, Lady Dorrian argued, would ‘fundamentally change and improve the way sexual offences are prosecuted in Scotland’.
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