Laura Hoyano writes opinion piece on judge-alone trials in the era of COVID-19

Associate Professor of Law, Laura Hoyano, has written an opinion piece for Counsel magazine on whether judge-only trials can deliver justice.

In this article Laura discusses the proposal by Sir Richard Henriques (a retired High Court judge) to help reduce the huge backlog of jury trials which continues to accumulate due to their suspension under the Coronavirus Act 2020, by resorting to trials by judge alone. She describes the Canadian criminal justice system where the right of the defendant to elect trial by judge alone instead of trial by jury has been operating uncontroversially for many decades, and is viewed as an expansion of defence rights. She emphasises that defence choice (as in Canada, Australia and New Zealand) must be a crucial element to any such change in the UK.

She was also interviewed for The Brief in The Times which was published on 7 May 2020.