Labour is today calling for “wartime juries” to clear the backlog of criminal cases that have built up during the pandemic, demanding a temporary reduction to “the size of juries from 12 to seven”. Shadow Justice Secretary David Lammy says:

“Justice cannot be delayed any further. Labour is calling on the government to tackle the backlog by speeding up the roll-out of Nightingale courts and temporarily introducing wartime juries of seven until the pandemic is over.”

Lammy’s called the same proposals he is now advocating racist in June…

Writing in The Guardian during the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, Lammy said that “dispensing with jury trials in the Covid era will damage our democracy”, specifying that even reduced-size juries:

“… are more likely to convict a defendant who is “less certain” to be guilty than large juries… As set out in Condorcet’s jury theorem, the larger the jury the more likely it is to make the “correct” judgement. This could be for several reasons, including the fact that larger groups can balance out individual prejudices. As the Black Lives Matter movement makes its voice heard, it would be wrong to ignore the reality of unconscious bias in our justice system.“

Is Lammy now, effectively, calling for more black incarceration?