This blog is long overdue, so apologies for that. In my earlier entries, I gave a plain account of what happened and what was said in my trial up to the point of my conviction. But why was I convicted? I tend to think that the decision was made in advance by District Judge Turner. After all, he had presided over several of these trials previously, and most XR defendants were making similar defences; that of necessity; just with slight changes in emphasis. I don't believe that there was anything we could have said to make him come to a different decision, but as I have said before, we are chipping away slowly at the conventional thought of what constitutes a rational and reasonable response to the climate emergency.
District Judge Turner was very punctilious in his approach to reaching a verdict, and this was clearly coloured by his experience over several similar trials. He even took time out during the trial to point us toward cases that he considered had set a precedent and provided us with copies of the relevant case law. As these cases set the basis of his verdict, I shall examine them in a bit more detail now.
DPP vs Ziegler and others, 2017
The background to 'Ziegler' is given above. The original Judge found in favour of the defendants, who had blocked roads at an arms fair in London, and had used the defence of their rights under articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights. This would have been a landmark decision, but the DPP appealed, and the ruling was overturned, as outlined above, on the basis that the original verdict did not give sufficient weight to the 'rights of the individuals in question to protest and the general interests of the rest of the community. The Judge had given insufficient weight to the inability of other members of the public to go about their lawful business by passing along the highway. In our trial, we quickly realised that this was an essential point of law that we had to overcome in order to have any chance of gaining an acquittal. We argued strongly (at least we thought we did) that our actions were justified because we were preventing a greater harm - a literal genocide and mass extinction - and that surely this harm was of greater importance that the convenience of the general public to drive in their cars around Parliament Square on a bank holiday. We gave detailed arguments and facts that this harm was of catastrophic scale, and that people were actually dying in massive numbers on that day, following days, and every day, from the effects of Climate breakdown. The harm was real, and the harm was not remote: it affected us all. Perhaps our arguments lacked the required eloquence or legal punch, because we certainly failed to persuade District Judge Turner.
The other case that we were directed to was Archbold, a case that defined the defence of necessity. Here is some background that we were given: The first extract defines what we needed to demonstrate in order to justify a defence of necessity:
We believed strongly that all of these three tests were passed by our defence, although the verdict would tend to infer that the Judge disagreed.
Here is some more guidance:
It is this last page that proved conclusive in our case. We sincerely believed that our actions in Parliament Square were necessary and proportionate. Where we fell short was in demonstrating that our actions in breaking the law could have prevented the greater crime (the death, suffering, damage, and mass extinction caused by climate breakdown). Our actions were never going to, by themselves, prevent this greater (and quite catastrophic) harm; they were merely stepping stones in a gradual acceptance by society and Government that something must now be done, and the Judge did not consider this to be enough justification under the law as it currently stands.
Any successful defence case by an XR activist needs to overcome this hurdle. District Judge Turner stated that we needed to demonstrate that our acts in Parliament Square were preventing a greater evil, and he argued that our defence fell way short of this. Future defendants need to find a solution to this, and demonstrate that our actions in taking non-violent direct action could conceivably prevent the greater evil, and it may take a better legal mind than mine to do this. I do think that John McDonnell's letter of support was the best evidence that we had of the positive effect our actions had upon the Government in informing them of the climate catastrophe, and of the changes in policy that directly resulted; but clearly more work needs to be done before we can succeed.
I hope that someone, eventually, WILL succeed, and I sincerely believe that someday somebody will. History will vindicate our actions, and my conviction was a sacrifice worth making.