So the author of this piece is pretty politically awful. He does also lay out what happened with the Filton decommissioners:
https://rozenberg.substack.com/p/activists-not-terrorists
In short, they were convicted of Criminal Damage (and one on one count of GBH). These are not terrorism charges. It is what they were sentenced for.
When you get sentenced the sentencing council gives a judge a starting point and a range. They then take mitigating and aggravating factors into account.
Although the judiciary, by the constitutional tradition, have the sole power to determine sentence, Parliament, by statute, can and does set some of those ranges and some of the factors to take into account.
The starting point for extensive criminal damage done deliberately and with serious planning, as here, is upwards of 1 year 6 months. The maximum tariff is 10 years. Judge Johnson started at 5 years. That seems high to me and Rosenberg shows his bias by not commenting on it.
https://sentencingcouncil.org.uk/guidelines/criminal-damage-other-than-by-fire-value-exceeding-5-000-racially-or-religiously-aggravated-criminal-damage/?source=7511
One aggravating factor which, by S69 of the Sentencing Act 2020, a judge must take into account is 'terrorism'. 'Terrorism' is defined to include serious damage to property for political ends. There can be no doubt that the decommissioners caused serious damage for political ends. That had to be taken into account as a aggravating and thus increased the tariff. According to Rosenberg, HHJ Johnson did take their sincere believes into account as a mitigating factor.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2020/17/section/69
A final piece of the constitutional puzzle is that juries are never told about likely sentence. The idea being that they are the tribunal of fact and sentencing is for the judge. The question for the jury is: are you sure that the offense, as defined to them by the judge, been committed? They don't get to decide if or how someone should be punished. That is for Parliament and lawyers. (I hate that. It should be my peers who decide if what I did was criminal not the state.)
A corollary of offenses being determined by lawyers and Parliament is that what constitutes a defense to the offence is determined by lawyers and Parliament. Following some high profile, political acts of damage to property, like the Colston statue ending up in the Avon, the Courts have ruled all of what used to be 'political' defenses to criminal damage unavailable.
The scare quotes are important. They were never political defenses, they were common sense. The defenses were things like preventing a greater crime or implicit consent of the owner. If you are about to drive someone else's car into a crowd so I shunt you off the road writing of the car, I can claim that I prevented mass murder and that owner would have wanted it. The higher courts have ruled that these don't apply if the damage you are preventing is not immediate.
No judge, even Yassir Arafat himself, would have allowed the defendants to bring their motivations, Elbit's business or Israel's genocide to the attention of the jury. They simply had no baring on the offenses as defined.
What does this mean:
1. Possibly apart from the high starting point, the judge has followed the law.
2. In a narrow sense, the rule of law has not been brought into question.
3. This is still, pace Rosenberg, massively problematic.
Why 3? Precisely because people who were not accused of terrorism were sentenced as terrorists. In fact worse, people who were tried as common criminals, were sentenced as political 'criminals'. By removing the political defenses, the protestors are presented to the jury as if they were violent hooligans wilfully damaging someone else's stuff. The jury are given no option but to treat them as such. (Yes, there is jury equity, but juries swear to uphold the law. They are not in fact allowed to vote with their conscience, though they cannot be stopped from doing so). Nevertheless the defendants are sentenced for what they are, political agents who took the law into their own hands.
The state, rather than your peers, gets to decide that you can never take the law into your own hands. This is authoritarian. It is what is problematic about allowing Palestine Action, or for that matter Al Qaeda, to be proscribed. The state cannot be the sole arbiter of what is acceptable political violence.
#Filton24, #PalestineAction, #Terrorism, #RuleOfLaw, #LawFedi
Heidi Li Feldman
David Kluft
Roberto von Archimboldi
Jonathan Joshua
Muge Onal Baser