DOZENS of killings and hundreds of alleged sexual offences are among a "significant" backlog of court cases to build up during the coronavirus crisis. 

Scotland's top law officer told MSPs the legal system has been dealing with an "unprecedented" situation and the backlog will go on increasing until courts are up and running again.

The Lord Advocate, James Wolffe QC, said he is "acutely conscious" of the impact this has on the investigation and prosecution of crime.

Giving evidence to Holyrood's Justice Committee, he said: "The service has changed very dramatically in a very short period of time."

High Court jury trials are to restart in Scotland from July after being suspended because of the coronavirus lockdown.

David Harvie, chief executive of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, said there were 18,319 summary and solemn cases outstanding and awaiting trial at the end of March. 

Of these, about 460 were sheriff and jury cases and 390 were High Court cases. 

This was already a 14 per cent increase on the same time last year, he said. 

As of June 10, there were 717 High Court cases that have been indicted and are awaiting trial, alongside 1,584 outstanding sheriff and jury cases.

The High Court cases include 49 homicides, 465 serious sexual offence cases and 182 categorised as "major crime", Mr Harvie said.

For 238 of them, at least one person is currently on remand awaiting trial.

Meanwhile, 20% of the solemn cases in the sheriff court – just over 300 – involve at least one person in custody awaiting trial.

Mr Harvie told MSPs there were 12,450 reports from the police in March. This dropped to 10,063 in April, but rose back to 12,436 in May.

He said: "Our expectation from those numbers is that that will give us an extra 300 High Court and 1,500 sheriff and jury cases, simply from those three months' worth of reports."

He said there were around 17,900 outstanding cases in the summary courts at the end of March.

Mr Harvie added: "Since then to the end of May, the Crown has served an additional 21,000 summary complaints across the sheriff and JP [justice of the peace] courts. 

"Obviously not all of those will end up being trials, but that's an indication of the number of complaints that have been served during lockdown."

Mr Wolffe said preliminary hearings will restart in the High Court this week, while two models of jury trial will be tried out next month and summary courts will begin to open up.

He said: "It follows inevitably that during a period when virtually no trials have been able to take place across the system, that the backlog has been increasing during this period. 

"It also follows that for such period as the court is unable to process cases at or about its normal capacity, that backlog is going to continue to increase."

He said some 1,500 laptops and more than 800 smartphones have been issued to court staff who previously had no capacity to work remotely.