ABSTRACT
There are over 12,000 different criminal offences in English law, 3,700 of which have been created since 1997. Professors Andrew Ashworth and Lucia Zedner recently identifi ed that criminalisation is no longer a last resort but has become ‘a routine system for management disorder’ (A. Ashworth and L. Zedner (2008) ‘Defending the criminal law: refl ections on the changing character of crime’, 2 Criminal Law and Philosophy 21). These offences can be classifi ed in different ways. You could, for example, classify them according to whether they are offences against people or property; you could classify them according to the type of mental element ( mens rea ) required for the offence, for example, ‘intention’ or ‘recklessness’. Another type of classifi cation, and the one that concerns us here, is whether the offence is triable summarily , that is, in a magistrates’ court (for relatively trivial offences like traffi c offences), or is an indictable offence (the more serious offences like murder, manslaughter, rape and robbery are indictable only ), triable in front of a judge and jury in a Crown Court.
