In Great Britain, Beating Cops With Sledgehammers Now Counts As ‘Peaceful Protest’
There is great disquiet in the United Kingdom over plans to severely curtail trial by jury. Right on cue, a trial emerged that seems to bolster the government’s case for using juries less often.
On the night of August 6, 2024, six deluded activists from the proscribed terror group Palestine Action drove a van through the factory gates of the Bristol branch of the Israeli defense company Elbit Systems in southern England, armed with sledgehammers, whips, and axes. Straight from central casting, the band were a predictable radical ragtag of autists, pacifists, amateur poets, and eco-fanatics who held so-called “jobs” like being a “forest school teacher” and a “regenerative farmer,” and who were described by supporters in terms like “an innocuous man who dislikes confrontation and would often feed squirrels from the window of his London home.”
Yet, once inside the Elbit Systems building, the nut-feeders turned simply into nuts. Wearing keffiyehs and boilersuits, they proceeded to trash £1 million worth of drones, computers, and other devices, even up to and including a highly dangerous disabled toilet, on the grounds that Elbit was allegedly producing drones for the Israeli military to use to commit genocide against the population of the Gaza Strip. The intruders also spray-painted the walls red to symbolize spilled Muslim blood.
Confronted by security guards and police, violence predictably ensued, with one vandal, the long-haired 23-year-old “philosopher” Samuel Corner, going so far as to use his sledgehammer to fracture the spine of a female officer, Sergeant Kate Evans, when she was kneeling on the floor. This is what “peaceful protest” in Great Britain now looks like—acts of extreme violence.
Sledgehammers and Nuts
Absolutely none of the facts above are in dispute, even by the Palestine Action cell involved. They admit (quite proudly, in fact) to breaking in and destroying private property, there is clear CCTV footage of them doing so, and Corner himself does not deny having hit Sgt. Evans with his hammer, albeit in supposed self-defense of his colleagues.
And yet, following over 36 hours of deliberations at Woolwich Crown Court in London last week, the entire mob was let off on all charges by the jury, who refused to convict. What happened?
The obvious answer some suggested is that the jury might have been an activist one itself. Woolwich is a center of pro-Palestine campaigning where the demographics and voting patterns are such that it is distinctly unlikely there will not have been any Muslims or left-wingers among the twelve good men and true chosen from the local population to adjudicate the case. Since in UK courts you ideally need full agreement between all twelve to return a guilty verdict, it would only take one awkward juror in a djellaba to throw a scimitar into the wheels of justice.
But, of course, jurors all remain publicly anonymous, being legally prohibited from revealing their reasoning to anyone not directly involved in deliberations. For all we know, they may simply have been drawn by pure chance entirely from Woolwich’s clinically blind community. As such, some expert commentators have been at pains to provide elaborate excuses for the jurors’ conduct, arguing certain of the crimes considered were more ambiguous than they may at first appear to the legal layman.
Hammer and Wrongs
One of the main charges the group faced was “aggravated burglary,” defined as entering private property armed with an offensive weapon. As the gang carried hammers, whips, and axes, their guilt at first seems clear-cut. However, all such items are not inherently offensive: You can use a hammer to hammer nails, an axe to chop wood, and a whip to tame lions, not just to disable prone policewomen.
Therefore, for the charge of aggravated burglary to stand, the prosecution must show that the items the intruders were carrying constituted offensive weapons at the point they actually broke into the building. As they demonstrably already had the hammers when they drove their van through Elbit’s gates, this seems an open-and-shut case.
But, defense counsel were able to argue, the hammers at the point of forced entry were not functioning as weapons at all, but as intended vandalism-facilitating devices. Yes, once inside the building, when the group began attacking law enforcement officers with them, the hammers magically morphed into offensive weapons, but the group cannot be justly found guilty of aggravated burglary simply because they happened to come “equipped” (not “armed”) with sledgehammers to sabotage drones with, irrespective of whether or not they later assaulted anyone with them.
In court, the group’s barrister, as summarized by the BBC, argued his clients “had not expected security guards to enter the factory during their action,” and hence collectively “denied any intention to be violent” upon point of entry, even though they clearly ended up being so.
Thus, apologists argue, there was a potential avenue for the jury to justifiably let them off here—but only if they were so gullible as to believe that the defendants somehow did not believe that security guards would attempt to guard the location they were specifically being employed to guard. The fact they came armed not only with hammers and axes, but also with whips, further implies the jury believed they intended to lash Elbit’s drones and disabled loos into submission, which seems a curious method of destruction to say the least.
Guilt-Edged Excuses
So, it is at least technically possible to excuse the jury for letting the Elbit Six off for legitimate legal reasons in relation to certain of the charges at hand—but surely not upon the specific offense of criminal damage, which they also faced. As the defendants made no attempt to deny wrecking Elbit’s property, their only real viable argument was that they were adhering to higher moral laws than the actual laws of the land, with their so-called “offenses,” properly considered, being not so much criminal damage as prevention of imminent war crimes.
Even if you agree with this ethical line, though, it still has zero basis in English legal procedure, as the presiding judge specifically instructed the jury. On February 4, jurors handed a note to the judge asking whether they could acquit if the accused had “genuinely believed they were performing life-saving actions” and thus felt “morally compelled” to destroy Elbit’s weapons of war. The judge said no.
Therefore, if the jury considered the defendants to have broken into the factory and destroyed property—which they specifically boasted of having done, and were caught on camera doing—they would be duty-bound to return a guilty verdict, if only on the specific limited offense of criminal damage. Yet the jury refused to do so, remaining hung and reaching no verdict. How come?
Outside the courtroom, protesters had placed posters informing jurors of their right to something called “jury equity”—their ancient de facto permission to acquit any defendant for any reason they so choose, something neither lawyers nor judges are allowed to inform them of during a trial, for fear of collapsing the entire legal system.
Strictly speaking, jurors are obviously supposed to convict if they think the defendant guilty. But, as there are no actual punishments for juries who do otherwise, general (but not universal) legal opinion is that effectively they can do as they please. If they think the law a person is being punished under is unjust, or if they agree with the defendant’s cause, or even if they just like the look of them and intend to ask them out on a date afterwards, then jury members can simply refuse to convict, and return what are often called “perverse verdicts.”
And, in an increasingly perverse society like Great Britain’s, such perverse verdicts seem to be delivered with swelling regularity.
A Law unto Themselves
The strange thing is, perverse British juries only ever seem inclined to act in this generously forgiving fashion when they wish to endorse any given left-wing criminal cause that happens to be prosecuted, not for morally subjective reasons of any other kind. Recently, BLM race activists who toppled a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, and climate freaks who sprayed Stonehenge with bright orange dye, were acquitted by juries likewise, even though these lefty defendants were quite obviously guilty of committing criminal damage too.
Such consequence-free antinomian activism has alarmed many commentators, with the Conservative Party Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Philp, calling for a retrial of the Palestine Action Six. “This verdict risks giving the green light to mob violence in pursuit of a political objective,” he explained. Prosecutors have since agreed to seek such a retrial, meaning the defendants are now free only on bail, not necessarily permanently. Yet a “green light to mob violence in pursuit of a political objective” is just what other rival left-wing politicians would like. Zack Polanski, leader of the UK Green Party, acclaimed the jury’s irresponsible decision, crowing that “people protesting against a genocide are not the criminals here.”
But the fanatically anti-Zionist (although himself Jewish) Polanski should stop to consider: Had an activist jury with a pro-Israel bent refused to convict some radical Jews who turned up inside a pro-Palestine mosque armed with sledgehammers, which they then proceeded to pound upon the spine of the imam who surprised them in the act of destroying his building, how would Polanski have felt about them being let off with near murder?
Left-wing legal campaign group Amnesty International also applauded the decision, calling the government’s wider actions against Palestine Action “a major intrusion into rights to freedom of assembly and expression.” The right to “freely express” yourself by smashing things up with hammers? If an extreme anti-immigration group started drilling holes in lifeboats so incoming illegal boat people would drown at sea, would Amnesty see fit to support their rights of peaceful power tool–based expression too?
Judging Juries
Polanski called the ancient British right of juries to let the guilty walk free for insane ideological reasons “exactly why the government wants to abolish juries,” and indeed, some legal scholars have argued the Elbit Systems case provides an excellent example of why many UK juries should be abolished.
This, however, ignores the competing fact that, under such circumstances, judges would be the ones determining guilt instead, which can often be just as bad. Plenty of British judges seem politically biased too these days, not only letting off guilty left-wingers, but also finding innocent people guilty of committing right-wing “thought crimes” on social media, in cases where most sensible citizen juries themselves may be thought unlikely to convict.
Compare and contrast the cases of supposed “speech criminals” Lucy Connolly and Jamie Michael, both of whom criticized mass migration online, for proof of this in action: The former passed on her right to a jury trial, thinking prison unlikely, and was then jailed by a judge for next to nothing, whereas the latter insisted upon having a jury, and was quickly let free by them, on grounds of pure common sense. In a country as captured by the left as today’s UK, swapping juries for judges merely risks exchanging one danger for another.
The true problem here isn’t the principle of jury equity, therefore—it is the state of certain modern-day British jurors, who think that they and their chosen causes are so morally superior that they are rendered automatically above the law. But, if certain judges out there think much the same, then there seems to be no viable solution available. The latest news on Palestine Action is that the UK High Court has, in the immediate wake of the Elbit Systems hammer trial, made moves to remove the organization from the nation’s list of proscribed terror-groups entirely on the absurd grounds it just hasn’t committed enough acts of terror yet: destroying factories and helpless policewomen’s spines just don’t count, so long as such atrocities are done in the name of an officially approved left-wing cause like Gaza.
Ultimately, the tiny hammer in the hands of the madman in robes and silk wig may prove to be even more damaging to UK civil order than the huge hammer in the hands of the madman in boilersuit and keffiyeh.
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