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But why is it so very important that we retain the right to jury trial, why is Sir Robin wrong to suggest that Juries must have no right to acquit in defiance of the law or in disregard of the evidence, and to suggest that an accused may not be tried by a jury.

To insist on this, is in fact to remove the very basic reason for jury trials, because not only is the jury intended to try the facts of the case, as the peers of the accused they are also entitled, in fact impelled to try the legality of the law itself. Sir Robin being a professional lawyer has ignored the fact that laws made in this country must have the support of the people, and the only way to ensure that is the case, is to allow the jury not to convict if they feel the law itself is unjust.

That we are now being asked to give up the very basic rights to freedom and to hold our government to account, that we have held as a people for over 1000 years, to the powers of the government to do anything they wish, is an insult to the very foundation of the British peoples right to be governed by their own laws, they are our own laws because we accept them, and we enforce them, not the government, not the judges, but us the people have the final power to refuse to accept a law we feel is unjust by refusing to find someone guilty.

Essay on the Trial by Jury(1852) Lysander Spooner
The jury was an essential safeguard of liberty long before the American Revolution. British courts guaranteed the independence of criminal trial juries in 1670, in a case concerning four jurors who had acquitted William Penn for illegally preaching about his Quaker beliefs. Those jurors were imprisoned for their “not guilty” verdict because they had ignored the trial judge’s instructions to vote for Penn’s conviction. An English appellate court released the jurors from prison, establishing the principle that juries cannot be punished for bringing in the “wrong” verdict. The freedom of American jurors to vote according to conscience can be traced to that landmark precedent. The purpose of trial by jury, as the Supreme Court itself has noted, is to prevent “oppression by the government.” To perform that role, jurors must act independently and conscientiously, and they must be prepared to “just say no” if they believe that a conviction would be unjust
Jurors in early America knew that if a criminal law was unjust, they could — and should — refuse to enforce it. They could vote their conscience, and as free citizens they were expected to do so. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.” John Adams said, “It is not only [the juror's] right, but his duty . . . to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.”
“The trial by jury,” then, is a “trial by the country” —that is by the people as distinguished from a trial the government
The object of this trial “by the country,” or by the people, in preference to a trial by the government, is to guard against every species of oppression by the government. In order to effect this end, it is indispensable that the people, or “the country,” judge of and determine their own liberties against the government; instead of the government’s judging of and determining its own powers over the people. How is it possible that juries can do anything to protect the liberties of the people against the government; if they are not allowed to determine what those liberties are?

Any government, that is its own judge of, and determines authoritatively for the people, what are its own powers over the people, is an absolute government of course. It has all the powers that it chooses to exercise. There is no other — or at least no more accurate — definition of a despotism than this.