It is against this background that we should judge the proposals from Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, to limit the right to jury trial. At present, the most serious offences for which this option is denied concern public order, with a maximum sentence of three months in prison. In many of these, witnesses may be few and partial and the evidence open to considerable dispute. There is a further point. Defendants in criminal cases are disproportionately poor, unemployed, young and black.
Magistrates are overwhelmingly the opposite.
But those are the costs of justice, which cannot be run as though it were a branch of Tesco.