Louise Casey, the Government's victims' commissioner, has called for the scrapping of the right to trial by jury trial for lesser offences that "clog up the courts", to save money. She also points out that victims of serious crime have to wait for longer to give evidence in the Crown Court as a result.

She is no doubt right in her claim that almost 70,000 cases which could be heard by magistrates makes up more than 40% of the crown court's business every year, which costs more money than trials in the lower court. But she apparently fails to appreciate that hearing such cases isn't just a "nuisance" for the Crown Court – it's part of our system's essential functions.

The right to trial by a jury of one's peers is one of the cornerstones of the British criminal justice system and it has been the basis for fair and transparent justice for hundreds of years. Any attempt to limit jury trials must be resisted.

Calls to limit trial by jury are really made for two reasons – trials by Magistrates are cheaper, and conviction is more likely. Neither is a good reason to change the trial process.

Her alternative, superficially more attractive argument, is also totally false:

"We should not view the right to a jury trial as being so sacrosanct that its exercise should be at the cost of victims of serious crimes."

It's a false dichotomy. This is actually an argument for greater resources in the court system, and is no argument against jury trials at all. And ultimately, even if her parallel is right, a fair trial is sacrosanct. Once you start tinkering with it, it will prove very hard to stop.

By Alex Deane

Extraordinary stuff emerging this morning about Sir Paul Stephenson, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. He wants to make it harder for members of the public to bring legal action against the police force.

The power to bring legal action against the police is an important tool in the arsenal of the citizenry, protecting us from the abuse of power by those entrusted with it and ensuring that the state does not overstep its bounds. It stands, furthermore, as an important symbol of the nature of the relationship we have with those who police us: we are not solely accountable to them; they are also accountable to us.

Furthermore, I think that there's a pretty obvious problem with his logic. If you think that legal action is being brought against you too often, perhaps the problem isn't with the system, but rather with…. (*drumroll*)… you.

Let us hope that Theresa May tells Sir Paul where to shove it.

There is a broader issue behind the suggestion, which I think is important. This was once a country in which it was felt, broadly, that the policeman is your friend. I don't think that that's true any more.

By Alex Deane

Related post over at Conservative Home: do you trust the police?

The Big Brother Watch team is well used to receiving reports of odd and extraordinary rulings from education-establishment busybodies but this one, quite literally, takes the biscuit.

Kathleen Lavery, a married mother of three, has been forced to quit her job as a primary school dinner lady in the Northern Ireland town of Enniskillen following the stress of an internal disciplinary procedure instigated after she gave a young child a biscuit.

Mrs Lavery was informed by the school that “her actions could be interpreted by some as grooming a child for sexual purposes”, a preposterous allegation which has led to rumours and innuendo about her personal life.  

The Chairman of the Northern Ireland Assembly’s Education committee Mervyn Storey commented the investigation was "political correctness gone too far".  He’s right.

Read the full story, c/o of the Telegraph, here.

Update: A BBW supporter has informed us that common sense has now prevailed and Mrs Lavery has been reinstated to her post.

By Daniel Hamilton

Back in early May, I did a lot of media work about attempts to impose an ASBO on a boy (coincidentally, represented by my old firm) who liked to wear his trousers around the mid-thigh area, exposing his pants.

I viewed that story like this:

1) he's an idiot

2) but the state shouldn't have anything to do with punishing him

3) the correct response is simply for us to form our own views about him (see (1)).

My take on Luke Angel, the boy who e-mailed the President and called him a Pr*ck and is now banned from entering the USA, is just the same.

Plainly it's a walloping overreaction. What does it really say about the USA that their Commander in Chief is so thin-skinned that a foreigner who insults him gets barred from the country? What does it say about a country when its migration laws are used to dole out punitive punishments for naughty boys?

The correct response would have been to ignore him. But if they simply couldn't hold themselves back, and the remarkable and shocking thing that this young man did simply had to be responded to, they should have said, "he's a bit of an idiot". Because he is. But they shouldn't have banned him from the country, a response normally reserved for those who are likely to commit serious crimes or constitute a grave threat to national security. Because he's neither.

By Alex Deane

The man charged with a criminal offence for posting "I am going to blow up Robin Hood airport" on Twitter has been convicted.

The judgement lacks common sense. Someone joking about terrorism on Twitter might be an idiot but he’s clearly not a terrorist, and treating him like one undermines faith in the law; it's a wildly over the top, authoritarian response to the current situation.

This absurd judgement is enough to make me want to blow up Robin Hood airport.

By Alex Deane