Even before the trial began, the British government had done its utmost to prejudice the proceedings against six Palestine Action activists.
It declared that they belonged to a terrorist organisation and that they were engaged in a terrorist enterprise in breaking into an Israeli weapons factory in Filton, Bristol – one, British officials avoided mentioning, that makes drones used to kill children in Gaza.
In the months before the trial, the home secretary of the time, Yvette Cooper, explicitly said her decision to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation was, in part, based on the events that had unfolded at the Filton factory. We were told the logic behind her decision – the first time a non-violent direct-action group has been proscribed in British history – would become clear through the trial.
In the midst of the proceedings, the police released a highly edited – and extremely prejudicial – video clip to present the defendants as bent on violence against the weapons factory’s security guards and police officers who later attended the scene.
Meanwhile, the judge overseeing the trial, Mr Justice Johnson, refused the admission of any testimony relating to the crimes committed by Elbit Systems. He also directed the jury to convict the Filton Six on the charge of criminal damage.
The British establishment wanted one outcome and one outcome only – and it did everything in its power to make sure it got its way.
Yet after eight days of clearly intense deliberation, the jury refused to convict the Filton Six of any of the charges against them.
They were all acquitted of the most serious charge, aggravated burglary, that could have seen them locked up for life. Three were acquitted of violent disorder, while the jury was unable to reach a decision on the other three. The jury was similarly split over the criminal damage charge, despite the extreme pressure put on them to convict by the judge.
Given the highly inflamed and politicised climate surrounding the trial, that decision required extraordinary bravery – a courage some of the jurors presumably found in the inspiring speech delivered by one of the defence barristers, Rajiv Menon. He reminded them of the 350-year-old right established in British law for juries to ignore judicial interference of the kind exercised by Mr Justice Johnson.
You can read part of that astonishing speech in the link here.
On possibly the most significant charge from the government’s point of view – of grievous bodily harm levelled against one defendant, Samuel Corner – the jury was again split. This related to a tussle with one of the sledgehammers that was being used to destroy the Israeli killer-drones. The incident led to a female police officer’s back being injured. More on that injury later.
The highly edited videos of the struggle released by the prosecution – a move that should have been held as contempt of court in a proper trial – were designed to prove the government’s case that Palestine Action is a violent organisation deserving of proscription.
(It seems it needs clarifying here for some observers that violence, in law, refers to attacks on people, not property. If Palestine Action only damages property – weapons being used to kill civilians in Gaza – that makes it a non-violent organisation and one that should never have been proscribed.)
It is important to set out why the jurors reached the decisions they did, given the widespread denunciations that have greeted their findings – not least from former home secretary Suella Braverman, now with Reform, and the current Conservative shadow home secretary, Chris Philp.
It is important to understand why the bar for conviction was never likely to be reached – and why the jury were right in refusing to convict.
The aggravated burglary charge required proving that the six defendants harboured an intention, as they broke into the factory, to use the sledgehammers they had brought with them not only to destroy the killer-drones but additionally to hurt the security guards. The prosecution was unable to provide such evidence because it did not exist. The jury, therefore, had no choice but to acquit.
In fact, it was incredible overreach to imagine that such a charge would ever stick. It was brought for one reason only: because it was critical to building the government’s case that Palestine Action is a terrorist organisation. In other words, it was an entirely politicised charge. The jury saw right through the legal chicanery.
The government’s fallback position was the violent disorder charge, which still suggested violent intent from the activists. The problem once again, however, was that the charge clearly did not fit the events the jury watched for themselves from the much longer video footage.
Violent disorder is a charge usually associated with football hooligans or groups of people who start pub brawls. It is meant to prosecute those who conspire to cause random acts of violence that innocent bystanders believe threaten their safety. However, the longer video footage – or rather the bits that Elbit Systems had not withheld or destroyed – showed that it was actually the security guards who initiated much of the violence.
In violent disorder, there is a defence: of self-defence. In three of the cases, the jury was sure that the defendants had been protecting themselves or their fellow activists from violence being directed at them from the security guards. That is why they acquitted. The video evidence, incomplete as it was, was presumably more ambiguous in the case of the other three, which is why the jury could not reach agreement.
On the least significant charge, criminal damage, the judge had made clear he expected a conviction – and he tried to rig the trial to get that conviction by stripping the defendants of the only defence that was available, of “lawful excuse”. The defendants’ argument was that, yes, they had caused criminal damage but it was justified in stopping a far graver crime, that of genocide.
Despite the huge pressure on them to submit to the judge’s demand, enough of the jury clearly thought that, in this case, criminal damage – in the form of smashing up killer drones – was a reasonable action. It is quite extraordinary that the hill politicians like Braverman and Philp, and sections of the British public, want to die on is defending Israel’s right to make killer-drones on British soil. Thank God, we had people with a moral core, not these ghouls, on the jury.
On the single charge of grievous bodily harm against Corner, the jury could again not reach a decision. He is still on remand, with the danger he will be retried on this charge and possibly others. It is, therefore, difficult to say much beyond the fact that, given the clamour to convict him from politicians, the media and Israel worshippers, there must have been pretty clear extenuating circumstances that led some of the jurors to believe a conviction would be unreasonable.
Unlike much of the public, who have been inflamed by the official story that a “police woman’s back was broken”, the jury heard the actual medical diagnosis. In his closing speech, Corner’s defence barrister set out the facts:
The doctors looking at the first X-rays didn’t identify any bone damage, nor in an MRI later. The injury didn’t require surgery and Sergeant Evans was advised to take painkillers and do physiotherapy. The agreed facts state from medical evidence that you’d expect such a fracture to heal in six to twelve weeks, with full healing in three to six months, and no long-term consequences.
Keir Starmer’s government – a government actively complicit in Israel’s genocide – has every incentive to keep the Palestine Action trials going. It much prefers a public conversation about whether opponents of genocide are violent criminals and terrorists than one about whether British government ministers should be in the dock at the Hague for complicity in crimes against humanity.
It is likely the government will seek at least some retrials in this case and try to secure convictions against other Palestine Action activists whose trials are still pending. It will hope that, sooner or later, it gets the victory it needs to retrospectively justify its proscription and silencing of Palestine Action.
From the government’s point of view, it is a win-win. If it can get a compliant enough jury to win one of these trials, it will say it was right all along to declare Palestine Action a terrorist organisation. If it doesn’t secure any convictions, it will argue that these failed trials prove that juries need abolishing – an agenda it is already pursuing precisely to stop juries acquitting people the government wants convicted for political reasons.
Sadly, too many onlookers are falling for this legal charade, denouncing the jury’s decision in the Filton Six trial as if they know more about what happened at the weapons factory that night than the jurors who sat through 10 weeks of evidence and spent eight days deliberating on that evidence.
That is a strange, unhealthy kind of self-regard – and too many people are currently engaged in it.
A final point. Yes, juries can make mistakes. But that is highly unlikely to have been a problem in this trial.
Miscarriages of justice typically occur when the jury’s own socially conditioned biases, bolstered by judicial and political pressures, take priority over the evidence, or when the evidence is rigged to secure a conviction.
They happen in trials like the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four in the 1970s, when a series of men were wrongly jailed for IRA-related bombings in UK cities simply because they were Irish. In these cases, the juries assumed that the police had not fabricated evidence and had not coerced confessions through torture. They were wrong. The legal system was more interested in securing a conviction than justice.
The biases we hold as self-evident truths are always socially constructed – and the people who get to construct them are the political and media establishments that dominate the flow of information we receive from cradle to grave.
Those same political and media establishments exert most pressure when they see their own class interests under threat.
In short, the pressures on the jury in this case were in one direction only: to convict the Filton Six.
Transcripts show the judge – the trial’s highest authority figure – barely hiding his own biases in favour of conviction.
In refusing to convict, the jury had to set aside its social conditioning, the natural instinct we all share to defer to authority, and the wider social expectations fomented by the establishment media.
The route of least resistance – the one most people take – would have been to have found all, or at least some, of the Filton Six guilty – not least Corner, who had been turned into a hate figure by the media. It is a sign of how strongly the evidence pointed in a different direction that the jury still refused to do as it was told.Email
