(Bloomberg) -- After the violence that swept across the UK abated, Guy Kearl, the senior judge at Leeds Crown Court in northern England, was doing brisk business.
Jordan Parlour was jailed for 20 months for his posts on Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook inciting violence toward a hotel housing asylum seekers. Next up on Friday, Jordan Plain was sentenced to 8 months for shouting racist slurs.
A short while earlier, Sameer Ali and Adnan Ghafoor were sentenced to 20 months and two and a half years respectively, after clashing with a far-right group near a gallery.
The men are just four out of more than 70 people involved in the unrest who’ve so far either pleaded guilty or been rapidly convicted and sentenced in courts up and down the UK. More than 900 arrests have now been made and over 450 people charged for offenses relating to the riots, according to the government.
But the numbers set to swell nationwide, new Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s plan to continue handing swift justice to scores more rioters will hinge on a hamstrung UK court system and overworked criminal lawyers.
Clogged courts with record-high backlogs, crowded prisons and crumbling infrastructure threaten to impede Starmer, who seeks to apply the tactic used after another wave of riots in 2011, when he was the most senior prosecutor in the country.
He has assured fast-track arrests and even floated night courts to make sure that rioters and people inciting violence online would face the “full force of the law.”
That’s been met with concern from the profession that he was once part of.
“This is not 2011,” Daniel Bonich, who chairs the Criminal Law Solicitors Association, said in a phone interview. “We just don’t have the capacity in the system.”
More than a third of criminal legal aid solicitors have left the profession and a third of firms have closed since 2011, according to a letter the association sent the government last week.
“Our members are not willing or able to prop up a failing system,” Bonich said in the letter citing decades of neglect.
The UK’s justice system has seen an exodus of lawyers after years of chronic underfunding clogged the courts with backlogs and sent lawyers, many of whom earn well below the minimum wage, on strikes over funding and fees.
At least half of the total number of cases at magistrates’ courts took 182 days from offense to completion, while it took a year to complete a case at the crown courts, according to government data at the end of 2023.
Reducing this number to weeks for the hundreds of arrests after the riots will require skillful maneuvering and resource management by Starmer’s administration.
Faltering on the promise would add hundreds of cases to the already burdened judicial backlog and dent Starmer’s credibility for failing in an arena he is most familiar with.
“Prosecutors have worked around the clock to ensure those who behave in this way are quickly brought to justice,” Janine McKinney, of Crown Prosecution Service East Midlands, said in a statement on Wednesday.
Magistrate courts — where cases are initially handled after arrests are made — had more than 370,000 outstanding cases at the end of 2023. While the caseload at Crown Courts, which take on the more serious criminal cases, was at a record high of 67,573.
Then on top of that, success for prosecutors in the courtroom could add hundreds of people to the overcrowded prisons.
Weeks before the riots began, Starmer lamented the “shocking” state of prisons in the UK. With more than 87,000 prisoners as of Aug. 2, they are crammed to about 98.3% of capacity.
Still, his administration has insisted the courts and the prisons have the capacity to handle to influx of cases.
After inheriting a “struggling” court system, “we have done what is necessary to ensure that we can demonstrate swift justice,” Camilla Marshall, a spokeswoman for the prime minister, said on Monday.
The government and judiciary “won’t rest until the job is done,” she said.
--With assistance from Alex Morales.
(Updates with latest data and comments starting in fourth paragraph)
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