Palestine Action defendants are facing sentencing as terrorists despite being convicted of criminal damage, lifted reporting restrictions reveal.
After reporting restrictions were lifted on Tuesday, Middle East Eye is now able to report for the first time that the court will seek to add a “terrorism connection” to their charges at sentencing - a fact that was kept secret from the jury.
Reporting restrictions also barred media from revealing that the defendants had been prohibited from explaining the motivations for their involvement in the raid to jurors.
Prior to the initial trial, the judge had ruled to remove the defence of lawful excuse on the charge of criminal damage, which meant the activists could not argue that the damage they caused was legally justified to prevent greater crimes being committed by Israel’s military in Gaza.
Absurd argument dismissing basically all context as “irrelevant” such as they have the right to stop genocidal weapon shipments.
The fact that that is an option for the judge is insane. That a judge can just be like, “I literally don’t give a shit about this topic. In fact it’s illegal for you to mention it, regardless of the relevance.”
Yep and this happens in a lot of different court cases like you see it often in average criminal trials where the judge throws out information and bans it due to “irrelevance” when it obviously is very relevant.
What is the check and balance mechanism for this? Judges can’t act arbitrarily - they need to adhere to a standard I imagine
You’re assuming Britain has genuine Rule Of Law rather than the Law being a tool to enforce the will of a few, a tall assumption.
No, they are most likely wondering what the intended checks and balances are. Not how they are used in practice (which we already know). I am also curious.
Well, sometimes the Supreme Court in the UK does do the right thing, though only after people have been Harassed-by-Court for months or even years and in practice only for people with enough money to afford the solicitor and barrister fees to take their case all the way up to it.
Sometimes it’s even worse - when the Law it’s actually in the books it might mean going all the way up to the European Court Of Human rights (which is not an EU organisation and still applies to the UK as long as they’re a member of the European Convention On Human Rights).
The system of check and balances is at best there only for people with enough money to afford it. (Though I suppose they could do as one of my family members did in my home country and actually get a Law Degree and take the case herself all the way up to the ECHR, though in the UK I believe even the cheapest Universities are pretty expensive)
Then, of course, there’s the other side of the injustice - actually punishing the guilty: the Crown Prosecution Service and other entities which prosecute crimes are pretty arbitary about who they go after as they can simply say “it’s not in the Public Interest” and that’s justification enough not to prosecute, with one’s wealth being inverselly correlated to one’s likelihood of being prosecuted (something indirectly admited by a previous head of the Serious Fraud Office - who are tasked with not just large scale Fraud but also Corruption - when they admitted they could only afford to prosecute as single large case per year) and the same for appealing even court rulings such as the one of the High Court Judge who, when convicting a public school educated criminal (read: so almost certainly somebody who is upper middle class or rich) for the crime of Fraud for the second time, sent him away with a veredict of Guilty but no penalty with the reasoning that “the shame of a conviction is punishment enough”.
Thanks for taking your time to answer in a constructive way. I have to admit I wasn’t expecting that (not because of you, but from the general attitude I’ve seen here on Lemmy lately).
Appeals