Two Just Stop Oil supporters who sprayed Heathrow departure boards with orange paint during the Oil Kills, international uprising to end fossil fuels last July have won a temporary reprieve as their jury failed to reach a majority decision.
Two Just Stop Oil supporters who sprayed Heathrow departure boards with orange paint during the Oil Kills, international uprising to end fossil fuels last July have won a temporary reprieve as their jury failed to reach a majority decision.
When you are doing something for publicity.
Possibly suffer
It is at the least probably suffer.
If you are intentionally damaging property while looking for publicity. And do not expect to face legal consequences. You are seriously failing to learn from history.
In this case. The jury was specifically ordered to ignore her motive for the actions. That was what prompted the response I quoted. And this is the case in the vaste majority of crimes.
Her argument was that climate change is not a belief but a fact. Unfortunately, that is not what the court claimed. The belief they ordered them to ignore was not climate change. But her claim that her committing a crime was excusable due to the need to draw attention to it.
You may claim she expected jury nullification. And heck, she almost got it. But that in itself is what I mean by history. Jury nullification is so rare in the UK as to be almost non-existence. To expect it from property damage. Where the evidence is public and obvious is not realistic. It is a theoretical principle of over legal system. Not a defined expectation.
Comparison If you speed on the motorway. You may believe it is possible you will get a ticket. But when you do it past a speed camera that flashes. You are not being honest unless you tell the wife it’s probable or pretty darn certain.
EDIT: unless you can claim someone was chasing you with a gun. Saving life has historically been an excuse for crime. But only in very direct situations.
Interesting to consider. If she filled aircraft fuel tanks with sugar. Or the jet engine equiv. Her climate change argument might be considered an excuse. As her belief that damaging the aircraft could stop the harm would be relevant.
Unlike damaging electronic signs, painting or historical documents.
Their goal isn’t publicity, that’s ancillary to their actual goal. Hmm what could their actual goal be… oh right: Just Stop Oil
I’m fairly certain that these JSO protesters are fully aware that they’ll probably face consequences. They might hope for jury nullification, but I doubt they’d expect it.
The judge can order the jury as they please, but the jury does not need to justify their decisions. This is exactly what jury nullification is.
The jury is the conscience of society, and their job is not only to decide whether the defendant did the acts charged, but whether they should be condemned and punished for it. The jury protects us from immoral or socially undesirable results.
As society has failed to properly act to avert disastrous outcomes, the threat continues to become more and more direct.
Won’t someone think of the lost profits, and museum glass that has to be cleaned. The wealth of billionaires is certainly more important than billions of people dying.