Still think Two Tier justice does not exist?

[rubicustellitall]

Ricky Jones found not guilty..my flabber has never been so ghasted!
Anyone have any views..

Can you imagine?

And if he did, and if people downplayed it as an ‘off the cuff comment’ 🤦‍♀️

She could have chosen not to take the advice, If someone advised you to jump off a cliff, would you do it? Personal responsibility.

Also - can't do the time? Don't do the crime.

LC is due for release soon. She is not serving years in jail.

She chose to plead guilty in the full knowledge of what that would mean for her. She could have taken her chances with a jury, as Jones did.

Connolly and Jones are both vile individuals. Jones got lucky with the jury, it could easily have gone the other way.

so someone with no legal training terrified in a cell should go to prison for years by making a poor legal decision on a plea but the facts that her crime was far less serious than Jones doesn't matter. What kind of insane thought process is that ? A court should prioritise common sense, not relics in grey wigs obsessed with pleas and an archaic justice system that belongs in centuries gone by.

To be fair, this isn’t really ‘if someone told you to jump off a cliff’ territory.

It’s not a random, you should be able to trust that a solicitor appointed to you is providing you with sound advice.

Of the many things to criticise her for, I don’t think this one is fair

She got a sentence of 2 and a half years for a deleted tweet which said " set fire to migrant hotels for all I care". As distasteful as it was, it isn't as bad as screaming " slit their throats" down a microphone to a huge crowd. The former is incitement after a poor taste tweet of apathy and the latter ISNT incitement? Behave

The courts follow the law. And ignorance of the law has never been a defence.

And Lucy Connolly is hardly 'serving years' - as a pp mentioned, she's about to be released.

I would imagine the majority of people who commit crimes have no legal training and are pretty terrified when they end up in a cell. Shouldn't we imprison them if they're guilty? Where do you want to draw that line? Feeling bad about the situation you put yourself in is not a reason why you should escape the consequences of your actions.

I've manage to live for 57 years without committing a crime. It really isn't that hard.

It's interesting to see how eager some people on MN are to defend what Lucy Connolly did. I wonder if it feels a bit too close to home for some posters? Something that might easily happen to them if they aren't careful? Or perhaps they don't even think she did anything wrong?

I don't have any need to defend Connolly or Jones. I think what both of them did was reprehensible and, on the basis of the evidence that is in the public domain, I do think that both of them should have paid a price for what they did. I find the jury's verdict in the Jones case somewhat surprising, but I accept that I may not be in possession of all the facts that were presented to the jury, and I also accept that trial by jury may sometimes throw up results that I don't agree with. However, that's the system that we have, and Connolly might well have benefitted from it if she had chosen to enter a different plea. But she chose a different path.

It's ridiculous to suggest that a jury verdict - reached by 12 members of the public is somehow part of some big conspiracy. Some people need to give their heads a good wobble.

'Behave"?

I am out.👋

She got a sentence of 2 and a half years for a deleted tweet which said " set fire to migrant hotels for all I care".

A tweet which was viewed several hundred thousand times. A tweet which was retweeted hundreds of times, so that the deletion did not matter. A tweet from someone who had tweeted many racist things in the months leading up to Southport, so a tweet from someone who had form for being racist. I'm not getting the love for Lucy Connolly. She and Ricky Jones are both despicable human beings. He got lucky. She got punished. Such is life.

If someone said " Kill yourself for all I care" in an argument on twitter, do you think the person should be arrested if the person harmed themselves? The second question is, do you regard someone saying " Cut her throat" drawing a finger across it in real life more serious or not?

Why do you want to make Lucy Connolly into a martyr? Why do you think posting racist tweets is perfectly OK? Most of us on this thread have (aside from endlessly explaining how the legal system works) made it perfectly clear that we feel both Connolly and Jones are awful people. Why the love for her? You keep saying 'we like Ricky Jones because he's Labour'. Flip that round - do you love Lucy Connolly because she's Tory, perchance?

What's the evidence that Connolly was badly advised? We will never actually know what the outcome would have been if the case had gone to trial, so it's impossible to say. She might have got off if the jury had found her not guilty, or she might have been given an even longer sentence.

For all we know, she may have recognised that she was actually guilty of the charges and felt that it was better to just admit it because she thought it was unlikely that a jury would reach a different verdict. She would have been aware that she had previous form for posting racist content online, and there was evidence from her text messages etc that she felt no remorse for what she had done, so perhaps she felt that a trial wouldn't have played out well for her. We don't actually know what her thought processes were at the time.

Jones was obviously prepared to take the gamble. As things turned out, it worked out for him, but it could have very easily gone the other way.

I didn’t make comment on if she was or wasn’t.

My issue was with the ‘she didn’t have to take the advice’ comment.

Whether she was or wasn’t badly advised, she (or anyone) shouldn’t be criticised or told to take ‘personal responsibility’ for following advice of legal counsel.

Why are you asking this? Saying "kill yourself for all I care" is not remotely comparable to what LC actually said. I'm not sure why you would think it is?

If you can't see a problem with what LC did, then I'm afraid that says more about you than it does about any issues with our legal system.

She can sue her lawyer for professional negligence if she feels that she was poorly advised.

I rather suspect that she was told that the evidence against her was pretty damning and that pleading not guilty would be a risk. And she presumably made her decision accordingly.

I can't imagine pleading guilty to a crime that I knew I hadn't committed, because I would be confident that the evidence would exonerate me. If I decided to plead guilty, it would only be because I knew that the evidence wasn't on my side.

None of this is really relevant to the point I made though, is it?

Do you think people should be told to take ‘personal responsibility’ for following bad legal advice?

When deciding whether to plead guilty or not guilty? To some extent, yes. Surely it's a moral decision as much as it is a legal one? In that scenario, I would listen to the legal advice but ultimately, I would be making up my own mind. I mean, maybe it's unreasonable to expect criminals to have any kind of moral compass...but if they lack one, my sympathy is limited in any case.

Regardless, I still haven't seen any evidence which suggests that LC was badly advised. Can you link to this?

If you were arrested tomorrow for a crime that you knew you hadn't committed, would you plead guilty if a lawyer told you to?

I wouldn't, personally. But I probably would plead guilty if I knew that I was.

If someone wanted to argue "Two Tier justice" existed at any point in time (with Group A being more harshly treated than Group B), you could cherry pick a few select cases to "prove your point".

The justice system hasn't changed, "Two Tier" is just the current right wing meme for whipping the ill-informed into a frenzy, to dupe enough of them into voting against their own interest.

Of course, there actually IS bias inherent in the justice system - but it's in favor of white folks, which makes the "Two Tier" twats even more infuriating.

When you can quote me saying she received bad legal advice, I will.

I know you didn't explicitly say it, but as you keep banging on about it, I assumed that you believed that she had received bad legal advice.

I stand corrected, and note that you seem to agree with me that there is no evidence of LC having been poorly advised. So we can set that concern aside now and stop worrying about it.

She chose to enter a guilty plea, and she therefore chose to accept the consequences of that plea. So what's the issue exactly?

Talk about main character syndrome.

I made a comment to another poster (not you) that I didn’t think their personal responsibility comment was fair.

On my part there’s nothing to ‘set aside’ as the only one ‘banging on about it’ was you.

How can you say you stand corrected, then end with the question you did?

Still implying that I even mentioned it?

Strange behaviour

Juries decide whether the defendant pleading no guilty committed the crime with which they’re charged. They have no say whatsoever in sentencing.