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.
Isn’t it more like they accused them of damaging property, the jury agreed that they did damage property and the judge decides that the damage was serious enough to fall under terrorism? It’s like mitigating circumstances. The jury decides if a parson did X but it’s up to the judge to decide if any mitigating circumstances should apply before sentencing. Here the circumstances are aggravating.
But they weren’t convicted of terrorism, which has a legal definition. So the judge shouldn’t be considering it as an aggravating circumstance since there’s no terrorism conviction.
The aggravation is terrorist connection , not terrorism. They don’t have to be convicted of terrorism for the terrorism connection aggravation to apply.
https://sentencingcouncil.org.uk/guidelines/offences-with-a-terrorist-connection-guidance/
From what I’ve read Schedule 1 are terrorism related charges. As you can see terrorist connection aggravation can be applied to crimes covered and not covered by Schedule 1.
This did not happen as far as I can tell. Neither are any of the listed examples applicable.
You’re saying the activist where not allowed to testify? I doubt that. This covers offenses specified in Schedule 1 and not specified in Schedule 1 so anything can apply.
But most importantly, aggravating is a very concrete thing. Jury doesn’t have to know anything about it because it’s not a charge. There’s a charge that the jury decides upon and aggregating/mitigating circumstances that the judge decides. The central claim of the article, that the activist will be sentenced for some crimes the jury didn’t know about is pure manipulation.
I imagine they can fight the verdict in higher court and they can appeal the aggregation and maybe it will be determined that the judge was wrong here but what the article implies is simply a lie.