Jury trials scrapped for crimes with sentences of less than three years | Hacker News Reader

Jury trials scrapped for crimes with sentences of less than three years

bbc.co.uk

35 pointspiker18 comments

Keir and Lammy want to jail Palestine action and extinction rebellion protestors. Juries keep acquitting peaceful protesters.

Juries are a great safety measure for bad law. This is why they have been vital for the last 600 or so years.

As an anime fan of 20 years who got raided by the British police last February for "uploading/downloading illegal anime artwork on _one of_ the artwork websites we're criminally investigating" (yes, you read that correctly) and is still currently undergoing a police investigation, this absolutely disgusts me.

I demand my trial by jury.

So going by your website: RAIDS BY POLICE counter is at 01. Keep your chin up, man.

Thanks.

They're not gone yet. They have to pass legislation to achieve the scrapping.

So we still have the ability to make our views known. Write to MPs in the first instance. Basically, they need to be informed that this is a bright red line.

However, I suspect it'll take a mass demo in London to really drive the point home.

Only 110k at the UTK rally? I'd hope a demo in opposition to this proposal would completely choke up London.

The UK has become a totalitarian nightmare. This is what happens when you keep letting government grow and grow without ever pruning it back.

"Totalitarian nightmare" is the natural state of the mankind. At the end of the day we are just animals, seeking to establish dominance over other animals. Couple centuries of democracy were an anomaly, raising from the fact that industrial revolution needed educated people as factory workers, but did not create effective tools of control over those (now educated and therefore more conscious and politically active) masses until very recently.

Judges here love to sentence you to 31months for words on twitter.

I generally don't believe in jury trials. However if some British people have right to them, then all British people should have that right.

This breach of Magna Carta negates the legitimacy of the Crown, so the people are entitled to remove the King, his heirs and his lickspittle parliament. We could do worse than to follow the example of the French in establishing their republic.

lickspittle...a person who behaves obsequiously to those in power.

Today I learn a new word!

I'm not an expert, but does the Magna Carta guaranteed a right to a jury trial?

I assume you are referring to clause 39, but it says "or" indicating a jury trial is not necessary?

> No free man is to be arrested, or imprisoned, or disseised, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any other way ruined, nor will we go against him or send against him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

Magna Carta: 1215 Boolean logic: 1847

This is sovereign citizen level nonsense.

Is it really though? Why are the courts so inundated with crime that this is happening in the first place? Are there uncomfortable truths not being talked about? Is that the reason why?

The partial closure of parts of the criminal justice system during COVID led to a backlog which in turn appears to have pushed the system to a point it has been unable to properly recover from - there are some very interesting statistics here [0].

As to why that is - the explanations I've seen generally feature incompetence amongst various parts of the system and a degree of underfunding (or perhaps poorly managed funding) - including the fact that there is a shortage of criminal barristers due to poor pay. Juries themselves don't seem to be cited as a huge problem.

0. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/criminal-court-sta...

This sounds like sovereign citizen or "freeman of the land" nonsense, but the one kernel of truth is that when people grow tired of the government, the inevitable end is a revolution, whether violent or nonviolent.

"Justice is hard, we'd rather have authoritarian power."

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