My latest focus groups took place in Norwich North, Waveney Valley, Walsall and West Bromwich, where we heard respectively from Conservative-Labour switchers, Green voters, Tory-Reform switchers and Labour voters potentially interested in an alternative.
Participants of all political persuasions were worried about the government’s plan to scrap jury trials for offences carrying sentences up to three years in prison. There was wide acceptance that the backlog of cases needed to be cleared, and that justice delayed was justice denied, not least for victims of crime. Some argued that open-and-shut cases could easily be tried without a jury, or talked about the inefficiency they witnessed while doing jury service themselves: “When you’ve got a smaller case and it’s apparent what happened because there’s CCTV everywhere, that someone has nicked a car or a bottle of booze from Tesco, what’s the point? It’s just there;” “I did seven weeks of it, and on the second to last day I got a trial, and the defendant walked in and the judge said how do you plead, and he said ‘oh guilty now’ and the judge went mad. It was a complete waste of time and money.”
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