High-profile sex criminals could face trial without jury under plans to tackle crisis in Britain's courts

6 July 2025, 19:56 | Updated: 7 July 2025, 06:48

High-profile suspects in sex cases could soon be trialled without a jury present under radical plans to tackle the huge backlog in Britain's courts.

A review commissioned by Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood is expected this week to recommend that defendants should reserve the right to request a judge-only trial.

The measure is part of a “once-in-a-generation” package of reforms aimed at tackling the crisis in Britain's courts.

High Court judge Sir Brian Leveson, who has authored the review, has suggested this could include suspects whose crimes have received such high levels of public attention that it would be impossible for an “objective” trial by jury.

Sir Brian had suggested in a previous review this reform could include defendants charged with sexual or sadistically violent offences.

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It could also include suspects from minorities or sects who may deem a judge to be more objective than a jury.

Similar systems are in place in parts of the US and Canada, where defendants in Crown Court trials reserve the right to refuse a jury.

He told legal experts last month: “I’m also going to talk about the extent to which a defendant should be allowed to elect to be tried by a judge alone, as happens in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand."

In an interview with LBC's Nick Ferrari in December, Ms Mahmood described the backlog in Britain's courts as "unacceptable" as rumours that some Crown court cases will no longer have a jury trial first emerged.

The Crown Court backlog has reached a record 77,000, with some victims forced to wait as long as five years for their case to come to trial.

Ms Mahmood previously told LBC that "justice delayed is justice denied", adding that the backlog was "likely to rise".

"The sheer number of cases that are coming into the system is so big that even if we were sitting at maximum capacity across the whole of the Crown Court, we still wouldn't be able to touch the sides of that backlog," she said.

"That does say that we need to think about doing things differently, and the announcements that we will be making will set out the government's proposals in this space, but we are going to have to think about different levers, because the problem we have at the moment is victims are waiting far too long to have their case heard in court.

"So many of them drop out because it's years that you have to wait till you get to trial. And we do have to ask ourselves, you know, what does justice look like when you have a Crown Court backlog that's that high, and I do believe that Justice delayed is justice denied.

"So we are going to have to think about a different way of managing our crown courts so that we can crack down on that backlog properly."

Sir Brian is expected to suggest a new intermediate court consisting of a judge and two magistrates to hear cases that would have formerly been heard by a jury in a Crown Court.

He is also set to recommend complex cases that may last at least a year, including fraud and cyber crime, should be considered just by a judge.

Magistrates are set to be handed additional powers to hear more offences where previously a defendant could have chosen a jury trial.

Currently, they can only try offences with a maximum sentence of a year, although this may be increased to two years.

Ministers are expected to draw the boundaries on which offences will be heard in the three courts later this year but Sir Brian is understood to have argued for a radical approach that would even see defendants who are charged with assault causing actual bodily harm denied a jury trial.