Break a woman’s spine with a sledge hammer on video and….

[noblegiraffe]

Despite you obviously doing it and the video being available for everyone to watch, the jury will be unable to reach a verdict as to whether you did it or not.

Whatever your opinion on Palestine, this should be absolutely shocking. That poor woman was just doing her job.

Honestly, when they talk about getting rid of trial by jury, this sort of thing goes a long way to convincing me that it’ll be no loss.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/uk-jury-finds-pro-palestinian-activists-who-stormed-elbit-factory-not-guilty/amp/

It’s horrific @Wellthisisdifficult am actually surprised anyone wants to join the police now given the hatred for them from some of the public.
its odd given the totalitarian regimes that are championed by those they are supporting!

Err no.

I'm explaining that the law permits you to come to the defence of a third party if you believe there is a genuine threat to that person.

If you do so, and it results in charges and a trial, it's then up to the jury to decide if you were acting in genuine belief and whether or not your response was proportionate. Nothing more.

Somehow, from this alone, some people have concluded I'm "pro police violence", and "supporting" the outcome of this trial. The first is risible tripe, and I've said nothing at all about my personal view of the outcome.

Actually the law does not permit this. Self-defence has a very clear definition, which what happened in this case in no way fits.

So how do you know the verdicts in those unreported trials are fair and sensible?!

Because of the simple fact there are mechanisms and procedures in place to deal with obvious miscarriages of justice, and as it's a tiny proportion of jury trials ever subjected to such things, it's reasonable to to conclude the majority of outcomes are indeed, fair, just, and sensible.

I've never claimed this was "self-defence".

It's obvious you have no idea what you are talking about, as there are zero mechanisms in place to retry anyone acquitted by a jury. Absolutely none. If the jury acquits, that's the end of it. The perpetrators cannot be retried based on rules of double-jeopardy unless new evidence comes to light. There also is no way to appeal a jury's guilty verdict unless (a) the judge has made an error in his directions to the jury or (b) new evidence comes to light.

I'm absolutely not surprised at that.

There's an organisation which calls itself "Defend Our Juries" which despite its cleverly chosen name is making an attack on English justice system.
https://defendourjuries.net/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defend_Our_Juries

Its proclaimed aim is to encourage jurors not to vote on the evidence but rather to "vote with their consciences" – as they are legally entitled to do.

The name is attractively rousing, stirring feelings of protectiveness and justice; and it has lots of fine things to say about Great British tradition etc.

But if you look, it's nothing to do with cases where, say, a survivor of domestic violence has struck back at their longtime abuser.

Instead it is all about public protests: specifically about Palestine Action. It's not about supporting of the people of Palestine in general, just that particular organisation. Previously Defend Our Juries supported Just Stop Oil.

It has a nice glossy website and is very well organised.

If one were of a cynical turn of mind (moi? Surely not!), one might suspect that Defend Our Juries is not entirely a grassroots movement. Rather, that it has been very successful at picking issues which will recruit sincere people from the grassroots.

So, we need to talk about some extremely popular techniques currently being deployed in politics across the world.

One is "disrupt everything". Breaking down old alliances and social norms creates spaces for disruptivists to swoop in and seize the ground. Disaster Opportunism has been around for a long time and now we also have the Tech Broligarchy. "Move fast and break things."

Another is "use what you've got". We can see this in the US over the last decade, where the Trump administration has been dedicatedly leafing through the statute books to find existing laws to apply in novel ways. They do this in order to carry out actions far outside the norm. The law can be from a different century when the circumstances it is newly applied to didn't even exist when it was written.

A cynic might note that Defend Our Juries looks exactly like someone has leafed through English law, spotted the conscience loophole for juries, and said, "What can we do with that?"

Defend Our Juries was co-founded by an English barrister named Tim Crosland over environmental matters.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57064576

It may well have been founded in some kind of good faith. But I'm pretty sure it's now being used as a vehicle by disruptivists. In fact it would be more surprising if it weren't – they'd have to be asleep on the job not to.

I'm not going to try to identify which actors might have a finger in this pie – it's years since the revelations about Cambridge Analytica or the Internet Research Agency in St Petersburg, and this is now a cheap and effective game anyone can play.

But TL;DR, I was entirely expecting there to be strong attempts to influence the jury.

No. I want jurors that can see what is just and true. Not blindly follow. For example no genocide has been proven. If a juror doesnt understand that basic point then they will have difficulty assessing the guilt or otherwise of someone for whom they think may be justified in committing crimes. Its indicative of pre-existing bias and needs to be weeded out to prevent further travestiesof justice.

What's obvious is you are having some sort of comprehension issue.

Please quote the post where I was making all these points you are now rebutting?

You are repeatedly ranting and raving about claims I've never made.

You’re a very poor story teller if you think what you’ve written in this thread isn’t indicative of your thoughts… but expect you’ll call that “tripe” again!

BTW this isn't a comment on rights or wrongs of the jury's verdict in this specific trial; I haven't seen the full evidence.

I thought I'd been pretty clear that when I stated that I'd have expected the jury to disregard the claim of defence if they believed there was no credence to it, that "my thoughts" are that the jury must have felt that was plausible.

How that amounts to "support" I'm not certain.

@PerkingFaintly yep and I'm glad you've outlined all of that

I fell down a rabbit hole of "defend our juries" looking at their social media one night. It is horrific.

The chaos that's happening in other countries is definitely arriving here.

there may be other periods of history that have featured this extreme gaslighting but I absolutely hate living it.

@XDownwiththissortofthingX I appreciate your neutral explanations

We won't get anywhere in doing something about all this shit if emotion is responding to emotion.

Unless you were in Court and heard all the evidence presented, you cannot really comment.

In the February 2026 "Filton 6" trial at Woolwich Crown Court, a juror sent a note to Mr. Justice Johnson asking if they could take into consideration whether the defendants' actions were motivated by a belief that they were performing a "life-saving action" to prevent genocide.

Mr. Justice Johnson instructed the jury not to consider the defendants' belief of preventing genocide as a "lawful excuse," citing a lack of evidence for such a defense. The judge also directed the jury to disregard their personal opinions on the Middle East conflict.

Is that sarcasm? Neutral? 😆

Fucking hell.

Of course. And they'd gone in there with a sledgehammer in order to commit criminal damage.

It was probably deleted as you call people 'pro Israel nutters.' HTH

vote with their consciences" – as they are legally entitled to do.

Are you legally allowed to do that? It sounds like "vote as you want the verdict to be according to your politics and bellefs", but aren't jurors sworn to give a true verdict according to the evidence?

Thanks for that brilliant post.

What, exactly, does being horrified at the bludgeoning of a female police officer, who was on the floor, with a sledgehammer, have to do with Israel?

Why should Israel have anything to do with anyone’s opinions on this particular incident?

The problem is, lots of people DO believe this case has something to do with Israel, and lots of those people believe that anyone on the Palestinian side of that issue absolutely holds the moral high ground, and so we end up with a case like this. Where someone clearly, obviously, observable on film to be in the wrong, has somehow ended in a no verdict, with MP's publicly posting in support etc
I despair.

Yes, because it's another vital legal precept that protects members of the public from state over-reach and persecution.

This isn't a perfect example, but I'm reminded of the number of times people have broken into UK nuclear sub facilities, Faslane in particular, and they are invariable cautioned for trespass, but never actually charged with anything requiring a jury trial.

The theory behind this peculiarity, is that Nuclear Weapons, as weapons of indiscriminate mass killing, are illegal under international convention, and as citizens do indeed have the right to intervene against their own government when they believe the government is acting illegally, any trespasser put on trial would simply argue these facts in their own defence. First of all, the UK government simply wants no part of any legal proceeding that acknowledges ownership of an illegal weapons system, and secondly, if the jury accepts the trespassers were exercising their right to investigate their own government's illegal behaviour, then they'd be perfectly within their rights to acquit on conscience anyway. Hence why nobody has any interest in a trial for what, on the face of it, is a serious matter, trespass on M.O.D nuclear facilities.

Again, if the jury believes the motivation behind the charges and the trial itself stem from a morally/legally bankrupt position, i.e. the State using the letter of the law to persecute people doing morally upstanding things, then they can absolutely decide to acquit on conscience. It's the ultimate protection against "the law is an ass" being abused in order to persecute fellow citizens.