UK jury cuts: a win for animal abusers and climate criminals?

The right to a trial by jury is under attack in the UK. The Conservatives cut the justice system to breaking point, leaving Labour a backlog of 78,000 cases. The government’s proposed remedy is extreme and controversial: scrap jury trials in all but the most serious cases where defendants face over three years in prison.

This matters for our rights to protest – something that doesn’t often lead to sentences exceeding three years. In recent years, juries have repeatedly refused to convict animal and climate activists after hearing their testimonies in court. If these reforms go through, that won’t happen anymore – regardless of how important, well-intentioned or peaceful the protest is.

Faced with the truth, juries refuse to protect cruelty

We think of ourselves as a nation of animal lovers. Almost 60% of Brits think the government should do more for animals, and we were the first country in the world to set up an animal welfare charity. 

The law may treat animals as property, but the British public knows that they’re much more. Strip away the propaganda of meat packaging showing lush green fields or the fancy hats worn at the races, and we find the reality of many animals’ lives unacceptable.

The proof? Behind the scenes in the country’s courtrooms, that’s exactly what activists from Animal Rising (formerly Animal Rebellion) have been doing. And juries have been standing with them.

Turning defence into attack 

In November, the Crown Prosecution Service scrapped its final two trials against activists who broke onto the tracks at the crown jewel of horse racing – the Grand National – in 2023. After three trials and zero guilty verdicts, the state’s lawyers decided enough was enough – juries won’t send activists to prison for taking on the horse racing industry.

Rather than apologising for their actions, the activists won by turning the tables and putting the industry itself on trial.

“Can you name any other sport where participants are whipped?” an activist asked the Grand National’s most senior organiser before the jury. 

“No”, she replied.

“Can you name another sport where a participant dies every other day?”

“No”.

The jury heard how horses are left dripping blood from their noses after being forced to run at extreme speeds. They heard how these are the lucky ones – that many never see the light of day again once they are injured or considered too slow to race.

It’s a big defeat for an industry that came out all guns blazing two years ago when it heard of plans to disrupt its main event. At the time, Aintree Racecourse blamed the protests for “endangering the horses they purport to protect, as well as jockeys, officials and themselves”. Two years and 118 arrests later, juries clearly did not agree.

And horse racing isn’t the only industry to come up against juries’ moral compasses. Earlier this year, four more Animal Rising activists were found not guilty of public nuisance – a crime carrying a maximum sentence of ten years – for blocking a milk supply centre in 2022.

The juries set them free after hearing from the defendants about the environmental impacts of dairy farming and the grim lives of industrially farmed cows. One juror later contacted the activists to say she was so moved by their testimonies that she had stopped buying animal products. 

From Magna Carta to today: juries matter

Putting a case before a panel of the people is an ancient practice repeated throughout the world. In Britain, the principle was written into the Magna Carta to limit the right of the monarch to do whatever they wanted. Over 800 years later, we still rely on the same mechanism to protect peaceful protestors.

If juries are abolished, it won’t be big corporations mourning their loss. Juries are one of the best ways that citizens can look powerful interests in the eye, hear the full truth of what they do, and decide whether the law should really be used to punish those who hold them accountable. Again and again, they have shown that they are capable of moral clarity where the state prefers obedience. 

If we want a society where people can stand up for what is right without being crushed by the machinery of the state, we must defend the right of juries to hear the truth and act on it. And let’s not stop there. Let’s pull the truth about abusive industries into the light wherever it exists, so that we can all draw the line on the morally indefensible.