1.3 Mixture?

The claim that ‘criminal cases are tried by jury’ is a mixture of myth and truth. Almost all criminal cases are dealt with entirely in a magistrates’ court, which does not have a jury. Some more serious cases go to the Crown Court, where most defendants plead guilty. The tiny proportion of cases which go to the Crown Court and where the defendant pleads not guilty have a jury trial. However, as the courts deal with about 1.5 million cases every year (Ministry of Justice, 2020b), that still means tens of thousands of jury trials take place each year. Having considered the role of the jury in criminal cases, in the next section you will think about judges.