Jury Trials Face the Axe in England for Complex Financial Crime

Juries will be scrapped in England and Wales for a range of criminal trials, including the most complex financial crime, in the biggest shake-up of the country’s justice system in decades.

Justice Secretary, David Lammy, said that in order to ease a record backlog of criminal cases, judges would sit alone in trials where the suspect is likely to get a sentence of three years or less. Juries will remain the “cornerstone” of the justice system for the most serious violent crime.

The “once in a generation” reform is “desperately needed because this government inherited an emergency in our ...