If you want to understand the underlying reason that the Govt. (in the person of David Lammy) wants to restrict trial by jury, don't take the claims it will resolve the courts backlog too seriously (even Lammy admits it will have only a small effect over time), look at what juries often do.... which is not just take prosecutors claims at face value!
Yup, they're unreliable in the exercise of political repression & so need to be removed!
Ha ha, the problem is the comparison is itself loaded... whose to say when a wrongful acquittal happens; of course the state can appeal (and sometimes does), but to say a jury gets it wrong is to assume some privileged access to judicial truth - in an advocacy system like the UK's common law legal system that is at best unlikely & for the most part impossible.
There are (some vey high profile) miscarriages of justice but even then the 'truth' takes year to be surfaced.
yes, there is clearly a method, although it would need to be a long-term qualitative driven analytical project to ascertain (more) reliable data. Of course the distinction between common law systems (as in the UK) and civil law systems across the rest of Europe & Scandinavia, with a very different role for the judiciary, which also makes drawing comparisons difficult
Emeritus Prof Christopher May
Torgeir Fjeld
Murf