UK
Darlington student guilty of blocking fuel terminal shown sympathy from judgeGavin Havery
Tue, 21 February 2023
Jon Deery, inset, was convicted of aggravated trespass after the demo at the Esso site (Image: Aja Dodd and PA)
A judge who convicted environmental campaigners of blockading a fuel terminal has appeared to sympathise with their cause by telling them they should ‘feel guilty for nothing’.
Darlington student Jon Deery was among seven Just Stop Oil supporters found guilty of aggravated trespass following a trial at Wolverhampton Magistrates’ Court last week.
The 22-year-old was one of 13 people who blockaded the Esso Fuel Terminal in Birmingham in April and he was sentenced to a 12-month conditional discharge and made to pay £250 costs.
Jon Deery (Image: Northern Echo)
The court heard Just Stop Oil peacefully blockaded the entrance to the Esso Fuel Depot, owned and operated by Exxon Mobil, and stopped distribution for nearly 12 hours.
Sentencing District Judge Graham Wilkinson reportedly said: “It's abundantly clear that you are all good people.
“It's unarguable that man-made global warming is real and we are facing a climate emergency.
“Your aims are ably and genuinely articulated and are supported by the science. “When the United Nations Secretary General gives a speech saying that the activity of fossil fuel companies are incompatible with human survival, we should all be very aware of the need for change.”
The Northern Echo: Campaigners stopped distribution for nearly 12 hours
(Image: PA)
The judge said he found the evidence of defendants ‘deeply moving’.
He said: “No-one can criticise your motivations.
“The tragedy is that good people have felt so much without hope, that you feel you have to come into conflict with the criminal justice system.”
“Thank you for opening my eyes to certain things”
“I say this, and I mean this sadly, I have to convict you.
“You should feel guilty for nothing. You should feel proud that you care, have concern for the future. I urge you not to break the law again. Good luck to all of you.”
Since the Just Stop Oil campaign launched on the February 14 last year and the group said there have been over 2,000 arrests with 138 people having spent time in prison.
A spokesperson for Just Stop Oil said: “The law is failing us. The wrong people are being criminalised.
“We know that we’re on course for catastrophic climate breakdown because of our continued burning of fossil fuels.
“The fossil fuel companies and the governments supporting their deadly interests are the real criminals – not those who are doing everything they non-violently can to prevent disaster.
“In the face of this reality, disruptive civil resistance is now inevitable and justified, and it will continue until the government changes course.
“Our families, communities, our country and civilisation are on the cliff edge of destruction, and we refuse to stand by.”
Environmental activists on trial barred from citing climate crisis in their defence
Graeme Hayes, Reader in Political Sociology, Aston University
Graeme Hayes, Reader in Political Sociology, Aston University
Steven Cammiss, Associate Professor, Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham
The Conversation
Tue, 21 February 2023
Four Insulate Britain activists recently stood trial at Inner London crown court on a public nuisance charge for blocking a busy London junction in October 2021. Like Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain is waging a civil disobedience campaign to force the government to implement policies to tackle climate change and fuel poverty – namely, suspending new licenses for fossil fuel drilling and renovating homes to help people use less energy.
But this trial was unusual. One of the defendants, David Nixon, ignored the judge’s instruction not to explain the reasons for his actions to the jury. The trial judge sentenced him to eight weeks in prison for contempt of court.
Courts in England and Wales are taking a more active role in determining the extent of the right to protest, and some recent verdicts appeared to vindicate this right in law.
These included the case of the Colston 4, acquitted by a jury of causing criminal damage to a statue of slave-trader Edward Colston in Bristol and the Stansted 15, whose conviction on terrorism-related charges for blocking a Home Office deportation flight was overturned on appeal.
The overall trend is rather different, however, and much more worrying.
Higher courts are restricting the defences available to protesters on trial and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is deciding which charges to bring in order to exploit this restriction. Judges, meanwhile, are more forcefully managing trials. The outcome is that defendants are increasingly unable to explain to juries not just what they did, but why they did it.
Necessity and lawful excuse
The court of appeal overturned the Stansted 15’s conviction but ruled that “necessity” defences be removed from future protest cases. These allow defendants to argue that they acted to stop a greater crime, or to save someone from harm, enabling them to explain their motives to juries.
In the Stansted case, the trial judge had ruled that the jury should not consider this defence. The court of appeal agreed and confirmed the principle, in what we described as “a hollow victory” for protest rights.
In another case (R v Ziegler), the supreme court upheld a magistrates’ court ruling that convicting defendants for blocking the road outside an arms fair in east London would be an unjustified restriction of their article 10 and 11 rights to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly under the European Convention of Human Rights.
Unlike the Stansted 15, the defendants in this case had been prosecuted under the Highways Act 1980, which lets them make a “lawful excuse” argument. Lawful excuse, much like necessity, allows defendants to claim that they acted reasonably in the circumstances, placing their actions in a wider context.
The supreme court’s decision initially led to a number of other verdicts where protesters were acquitted for obstructing a highway. Defence teams assumed that Ziegler could be applied to other offences with explicit lawful or reasonable excuse defences, such as criminal damage.
In the Colston 4 trial, one of the legal arguments made in court was that even had the jury found the defendants guilty of causing criminal damage to Colston’s statue, it would have been disproportionate to convict them of the offence given the importance of freedom of expression.
Shutting down Ziegler
The higher courts have since acted swiftly to shut down this argument. The court of appeal ruled in 2022 that the trial judge was wrong to accept Ziegler might apply in the Colston case.
The high court ruled similarly for aggravated trespass by HS2 protesters in the March case of R v Cuciurean. And the supreme court followed suit when confirming the legality of no-protest buffer zones around abortion clinics in Northern Ireland in December.
As a result, whether defendants in protest cases can explain their actions to a jury depends upon the offence they are charged with. Wider motives can only be raised where lawful excuse is explicitly provided for in the law and, even then, for only a narrow range of offences due to the limited interpretation of Ziegler.
It’s perhaps no surprise then that the CPS has brought a raft of public nuisance rather than highway obstruction charges against Insulate Britain protesters. Unlike obstructing a highway, public nuisance does not require a court to balance the impact of the protest against the defendant’s article 10 and 11 rights.
But if this explains the limited range of defences available to protesters, it does not explain why Nixon was imprisoned. That requires an understanding of the changing role of judges in England and Wales.
Recent legal reforms mean judges are increasingly concerned with narrowing the range of issues open to legal dispute in order to expedite cases. If a judge rules that no defence exists in law to a given charge, they can also direct that no related evidence can be called by the defence.
The trial judge no longer stands above the case, but manages it. Nixon’s contempt conviction is a flexing of this judicial muscle.
What are trials for?
In Nixon’s case, conviction for contempt of court seems particularly disproportionate – penalties for breaches of case management orders are not regularly enforced.
But beyond the question of what penalty should be applied for ignoring trial directions, there lie more fundamental ones about the operation of the criminal justice process.
Trials determine guilt or innocence, but they also signal to the public about matters of collective importance and moral value.
The legal philosopher Antony Duff suggests that criminal cases are a means of holding fellow citizens to account for their behaviour. A trial fails in this regard if it doesn’t let defendants account for their behaviour in ways that are meaningful to them.
Juries continue to acquit defendants in similar protest cases despite the framing of the law and the attempts of judges to manage trials. There is a long tradition in the UK and US of juries acting as a check on state abuse, allowing an acquittal in the face of the law if a conviction would be morally inappropriate.
But if jurors cannot hear the claims of defendants, we may ask how they are supposed to assess whether a given prosecution is appropriate, or if the actions of the defendants have significant moral or community value. Cases such as Nixon’s should invite us to consider what juries are for, and what upholding freedom of expression means.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Steven Cammiss is a member of the Labour Party.
Graeme Hayes is a member of the Labour Party
Tue, 21 February 2023
Four Insulate Britain activists recently stood trial at Inner London crown court on a public nuisance charge for blocking a busy London junction in October 2021. Like Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain is waging a civil disobedience campaign to force the government to implement policies to tackle climate change and fuel poverty – namely, suspending new licenses for fossil fuel drilling and renovating homes to help people use less energy.
But this trial was unusual. One of the defendants, David Nixon, ignored the judge’s instruction not to explain the reasons for his actions to the jury. The trial judge sentenced him to eight weeks in prison for contempt of court.
Courts in England and Wales are taking a more active role in determining the extent of the right to protest, and some recent verdicts appeared to vindicate this right in law.
These included the case of the Colston 4, acquitted by a jury of causing criminal damage to a statue of slave-trader Edward Colston in Bristol and the Stansted 15, whose conviction on terrorism-related charges for blocking a Home Office deportation flight was overturned on appeal.
The overall trend is rather different, however, and much more worrying.
Higher courts are restricting the defences available to protesters on trial and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is deciding which charges to bring in order to exploit this restriction. Judges, meanwhile, are more forcefully managing trials. The outcome is that defendants are increasingly unable to explain to juries not just what they did, but why they did it.
Necessity and lawful excuse
The court of appeal overturned the Stansted 15’s conviction but ruled that “necessity” defences be removed from future protest cases. These allow defendants to argue that they acted to stop a greater crime, or to save someone from harm, enabling them to explain their motives to juries.
In the Stansted case, the trial judge had ruled that the jury should not consider this defence. The court of appeal agreed and confirmed the principle, in what we described as “a hollow victory” for protest rights.
In another case (R v Ziegler), the supreme court upheld a magistrates’ court ruling that convicting defendants for blocking the road outside an arms fair in east London would be an unjustified restriction of their article 10 and 11 rights to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly under the European Convention of Human Rights.
Unlike the Stansted 15, the defendants in this case had been prosecuted under the Highways Act 1980, which lets them make a “lawful excuse” argument. Lawful excuse, much like necessity, allows defendants to claim that they acted reasonably in the circumstances, placing their actions in a wider context.
The supreme court’s decision initially led to a number of other verdicts where protesters were acquitted for obstructing a highway. Defence teams assumed that Ziegler could be applied to other offences with explicit lawful or reasonable excuse defences, such as criminal damage.
In the Colston 4 trial, one of the legal arguments made in court was that even had the jury found the defendants guilty of causing criminal damage to Colston’s statue, it would have been disproportionate to convict them of the offence given the importance of freedom of expression.
Shutting down Ziegler
The higher courts have since acted swiftly to shut down this argument. The court of appeal ruled in 2022 that the trial judge was wrong to accept Ziegler might apply in the Colston case.
The high court ruled similarly for aggravated trespass by HS2 protesters in the March case of R v Cuciurean. And the supreme court followed suit when confirming the legality of no-protest buffer zones around abortion clinics in Northern Ireland in December.
As a result, whether defendants in protest cases can explain their actions to a jury depends upon the offence they are charged with. Wider motives can only be raised where lawful excuse is explicitly provided for in the law and, even then, for only a narrow range of offences due to the limited interpretation of Ziegler.
It’s perhaps no surprise then that the CPS has brought a raft of public nuisance rather than highway obstruction charges against Insulate Britain protesters. Unlike obstructing a highway, public nuisance does not require a court to balance the impact of the protest against the defendant’s article 10 and 11 rights.
But if this explains the limited range of defences available to protesters, it does not explain why Nixon was imprisoned. That requires an understanding of the changing role of judges in England and Wales.
Recent legal reforms mean judges are increasingly concerned with narrowing the range of issues open to legal dispute in order to expedite cases. If a judge rules that no defence exists in law to a given charge, they can also direct that no related evidence can be called by the defence.
The trial judge no longer stands above the case, but manages it. Nixon’s contempt conviction is a flexing of this judicial muscle.
What are trials for?
In Nixon’s case, conviction for contempt of court seems particularly disproportionate – penalties for breaches of case management orders are not regularly enforced.
But beyond the question of what penalty should be applied for ignoring trial directions, there lie more fundamental ones about the operation of the criminal justice process.
Trials determine guilt or innocence, but they also signal to the public about matters of collective importance and moral value.
The legal philosopher Antony Duff suggests that criminal cases are a means of holding fellow citizens to account for their behaviour. A trial fails in this regard if it doesn’t let defendants account for their behaviour in ways that are meaningful to them.
Juries continue to acquit defendants in similar protest cases despite the framing of the law and the attempts of judges to manage trials. There is a long tradition in the UK and US of juries acting as a check on state abuse, allowing an acquittal in the face of the law if a conviction would be morally inappropriate.
But if jurors cannot hear the claims of defendants, we may ask how they are supposed to assess whether a given prosecution is appropriate, or if the actions of the defendants have significant moral or community value. Cases such as Nixon’s should invite us to consider what juries are for, and what upholding freedom of expression means.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Steven Cammiss is a member of the Labour Party.
Graeme Hayes is a member of the Labour Party
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