ABSTRACT
There are over 12,000 different criminal offences in English law. 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; again, you could classify them according to the type of mental element ( mens rea ) required for the offence, for example, ‘intention’ or ‘recklessness’. One other type of classifi cation, and the one to concern 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.
