Docks and the presumption of innocence

The presumption of innocence is hugely important. Amongst other things it emphasises that the powers of punishment possessed by the State should only be exercised against individuals whose guilt has been proved by reliable evidence. Numerous inroads have been made into that basic principle in the last twenty years, including requiring accused people to prove their innocence in some circumstances and allowing types of evidence to be given that have been considered unreliable for decades and, in some rare cases, centuries. I do not want to discuss those today but to look at something that occurs every day in criminal courts and which I have always considered fundamentally at odds with the presumption of innocence.

I refer to the practice of the accused person having to sit in the dock. As a general rule of courtroom architecture the dock is an enclosed area towards the rear of the court and faces the judge, lawyers involved in the case sit between the dock and the judge. In some older courts, such as the four original courts at the Central Criminal Court (Old Bailey), the lawyers sit on the side opposite the jury but in almost all newer courts the lawyers sit in rows in front of the judge with the dock behind them.

Many docks are raised above the level of the well of the court and the defendant sits in deliberate, exposed isolation as his fate is decided by everyone before him. His legal team cannot just lean over and ask him a question or pass him a note, they have to move to the back of the court and stretch upwards to get their instructions. It draws attention and disrupts proceedings.

In the civil courts the litigants sit with their lawyers. This is useful because it is often necessary to take further instructions during a case and it can be done quietly and without interrupting the trial if the person you need to speak to is beside you or in the row behind. More than that, both the claimant and the defendant are on the same physical level. Although one of them claims that the other has done something wrong, the presumption of innocence applies also in civil cases and this is reflected by the fact that they sit in the same row of seats no matter how bitter their dispute.

Many High Court judges spend most of their lives working as barristers or solicitors on complex civil disputes and then, on being appointed to the bench, are given a pretty constant diet of serious criminal cases to try. Often this means murders and manslaughters. Although long fraud trials are rarer now than twenty or so years ago they still happen and the usual practice now is to dispense with a dock and allow the defendants to sit with their legal team. That practice was first adopted regularly in the late 1980s when the courtrooms used for such cases simply did not have docks because they were not designed as criminal courts. No problem was encountered of defendants doing a runner during the morning smoking break, it all worked rather well and allowed the proceedings to be got through with the minimum of fuss.

That, indeed, is the practice in most States of the USA. Even in cases of capital murder the accused person sits with his defence team in the well of the court. He might be in handcuffs or ankle cuffs, where there is any serious fear that he will abscond he will be in some sort of restraints, but he is presumed innocent of the charge he faces so he faces that charge without being put on an isolated pedestal at the rear of the court like an exhibit in a freak show.

Where there are very solid grounds for believing an accused person might abscond there are also good grounds for him being placed in an area of the court from which escape is difficult. That is, however, a very rare circumstance. In the normal run of things defendants are not kept in custody before or during their trial. They go home at the end of each day and turn up the next day. When in the car or on the bus going to and from court they are just another person, no one gives them a second glance. But when they get to court they are sent to a special confined area and set apart from everyone else involved in the trial.

It could be said that placing a defendant in the dock suggests nothing about his guilt or innocence and is merely giving him a special place because the case is about him. But that misses the point. Everyone with a need to know who is accused will know it regardless of where he sits. By separating him physically you set him apart from everyone else simply because he has been accused. Yet he is not different simply by reason of being accused, he is still presumed innocent just as the judge, lawyers, jury and court staff are presumed innocent whatever they might actually have done.

Let me link this to current news. Today it is reported that two men have been arrested on suspicion of the murder of PC Keith Blakelock in 1985. I popped into the Old Bailey to watch a few hours' evidence when three people were tried for that murder in 1987. It was headline news at the time and a chum of mine was representing one of them, so I thought I'd take a look. I had an afternoon when my paperwork could wait, so went down to the Old Bailey, donned the wig and gown and went into court. The first thing I did (after bowing to the bench, you always have to do that first) was look up at the dock to see "them". And that is exactly how it was, there was a "them", a trio of brutal murder suspects. I didn't view them as just three blokes I might have been sat near in a pub. They had a different character, they were accused of murder and their very presence in the dock identified them as something different from the rest of us. I cannot pretend I looked on them with the presumption of innocence at the forefront of my mind because I did not. Ghoulish though it was, I felt I was looking at three cold-blooded barbarians who hacked a police officer to death with machetes. As you probably know they were convicted but then freed on appeal due to serious deficiencies in the way evidence was gathered. When gawping at them I was not applying a presumption of innocence, I was doing exactly the opposite and the effect was enhanced by all three of them being in the special naughty box.

Docks have been part of our criminal courtrooms for well over a hundred years. Today they are less appropriate than ever because press and TV reporting of serious crimes has become so sensational that the presumption of innocence is undermined long before an accused person appears in court. The very least that can be done is to ensure the courtroom does not add to the isolation of the accused person from all the other "presumed innocent" people in court.

Good judgment need not be rational

I have commented before that juries might reach a unanimous verdict for a range of different reasons. Of the twelve people on the jury perhaps two think the defendant really is innocent, two think he is probably guilty but that his guilt has not been proved beyond reasonable doubt, two think him guilty but don't like the way the police investigated the matter, two think him guilty but don't want him to become a martyr for a cause they detest, two know he would be sent to prison if convicted and think that would be too harsh and two simply don't care so they go with the flow. We have a strict law against investigating or disclosing the workings of the jury room (although the occasional study is allowed). The cynical might suggest the law exists to prevent the lack of rational thought of the average jury being exposed to public knowledge, I prefer to look at it rather differently.

People are not entirely rational. Some are wholly irrational under all circumstances. All have personal opinions and emotions that affect their judgments. People come in all levels of analytical ability and all levels of balance between the weight they give their emotional and rational reactions to situations. Everyone who thinks about it for a second will understand that juries must always comprise a mix of people of differing intelligence, attitudes to the police, opinions about the type of offence the defendant is accused of committing and dozens of other qualities that will affect the decision they reach.

One reason we have juries to decide the guilt or otherwise of someone charged with a serious offence is because someone has to decide and it is thought better that it should be a random-ish cross-section of the public rather than a middle aged bloke in a wig. In the early 1990s I was involved in a series of trials concerning an organised fraud. It shed interesting light on the weight that should be given to a jury's verdict.

A property developer was building a load of new flats and houses just as the property market started to fall in 1989. Many developments are undertaken without sufficient capital to pay for the building of every unit. What you do is get some units finished as quickly as possible on one part of the site and market them. Some purchasers might have bought "off-plan" even before the places were built and the other units are marketed in the conventional way. This brings in money which is then used to complete the next tranche and so on until the whole development is completed. The developer will have spent a lot of money up-front buying the land, engaging architects, securing planning permission, arranging for the supply of utilities and paying for the creation of new road junctions so that the site can be entered and exited safely. The properties themselves also cost money to build. These costs can only be recovered by selling the new properties and it takes a lot of sales to cover them. The developer only makes a profit on the last tranche of properties, the first 75% or more just reimburse costs he has incurred.

The difficulty for the developer in my case was that the crash in the market meant he simply could not sell enough units for a high enough price to cover his costs. There were buyers at a price, but the price was not high enough. What he did was to find friends and relatives to act as bogus buyers. They applied for loans from finance companies that asked for few if any checks of their ability to pay. In order for the scam to work he not only needed helpful bogus buyers, he also needed the help of a mortgage broker who wouldn't ask any questions and a surveyor who would give generous valuations in a falling market. Once a sale was made the developer received the cash and the bogus buyers never repaid a penny. In due course numerous properties were repossessed and sold for a fraction of their purchase price just a year or so earlier.

The developer and several of his cohorts were prosecuted for conspiracy to defraud. They were also sued in the civil courts for the money they had extracted from the finance companies. The criminal trial came first. Some of the accused were convicted but not all. When the civil trial came to be heard the judge was faced with claims being made against alleged conspirators who had been acquitted after a lengthy criminal trial. On the first morning he asked how he could find against those who had been acquitted by a jury. The answer given was technically correct - the jury had to be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt whereas the judge in the civil claim only had to be satisfied on the balance of probabilities. Then the judge threw in the killer blow. He asked how he could know that the jury was satisfied of guilt on the balance of probabilities and acquitted only because the higher standard of proof required in a criminal court had not been met. Of course there was no answer to that. He took the view that it would be perverse of him to find, on the balance of probabilities, that someone had acted fraudulently if a jury had not been satisfied of that fact to that standard. Since acquittal did not establish that the jury was satisfied on the balance of probabilities he was not prepared to second-guess their judgment.

Interestingly, that judge had never been involved in a jury trial either in his years in practice at the Bar or in his time on the bench but that did not leave him with a sense that his judgment on issues of fact that will affect a person's whole life was better than that of twelve people picked off the electoral roll. He actually said that he saw no reason why his judgment on issues of fact should be any more accurate or any more just than one reached by a jury. In my experience that is a view held also by judges who deal only with criminal cases, indeed many have told me exactly that.

There is nothing to balance the emotions and opinions of a judge sitting alone other than his ability to leave such matters to one side and seek to be objective. All sorts of balancing factors apply to a jury of twelve people seeking to establish a unanimous verdict. And more, you might have identical jury trials a decade apart resulting in different verdicts because the general sway of public opinion has changed on a matter.

The danger with trial by judge alone is not just that it is only one person reaching an important decision but also that reaching just decisions almost always requires value judgments to be made and values in a dynamic society are never set in stone. It is more difficult for one person, who is obliged to give reasons for his or her decision, to reflect current values than it is for a dozen whose reasoning is not open to scrutiny.

"Howzatt?" Guilty as charged.

Today a former England cricketer was sentenced to 13 years in chokey for smuggling cocaine. Chris Lewis was an excellent player when he tried, sadly he didn't try often enough and his career was littered with lost opportunities. From the little I have read about it, his venture into drug smuggling was equally half-baked. He and a friend imported liquid cocaine in containers labelled as fruit juice. Most comical of all was the pair's decision to blame each other - the classic "cut-throat" defence.

Smuggling drugs is fraught with difficulties. Actually, I'm not in a position to say how difficult the smuggling itself is but I can say something about the difficulties faced if caught. You see, there's no such thing as a good defence. The tin of pineapple chunks in your luggage turns out to be full of cocaine, what can you say that might possibly make sense?

"My mum likes pineapple chunks so I bought them as a present." OK, so how did it happen that the tin of innocent fruit turned into thousands of pounds worth of Colombia's finest? How did it get onto the shelves of the QuickyMart in the first place? And how very lucky that it was intercepted by HM Revenue & Customs before dear old Ma wolfed it down a drop of Carnation milk.

Or you could try this one: "I never knew it was there, it must have been planted in my luggage by an unknown stranger." Bit tricky that, how do you explain that you didn't notice it? Say it wasn't in your luggage but you came over by car and it was found under the spare tyre in the boot. Then you have to explain how the intended recipient was going to recover it from you. If you have no connection to the importation chain this might prove a little impractical.

And then there is the defence run by Mr Lewis and his chum: "My friend gave it to me to bring over for him because he feared his luggage would be overweight." In this case each said it of the other. Now you know the real reason we are asked that seemingly daft question at airports: "has anyone given you anything to carry?" It isn't so that we will say "yes", it's so we will say "no"; then when we are caught and say we were just carrying the pineapple chunks for a heavily laden friend we find we shot ourselves in the foot at the start of the journey. Of course when travelling with a friend you might find that one of you is over the baggage weight allowance and the other is under so spreading the load makes sense, but only a moron takes a container of anything, sensible people relieve their friend of clothes or stolen hotel towels.

A necessary part of the defence is that you didn't know the stuff was cocaine. This aspect of it tends to stand or fall alongside the inanity of your excuse for carrying the package in the first place. Once a jury dismisses your story about how the stuff came into your possession it follows almost as night follows day that they won't believe anything else you tell them.

Following that theme, I now arrive at the "cut-throat" defence - where the two defendants blame each other. Amateur criminals rather like the cut-throat defence. They talk about it while awaiting trial and conclude that by blaming each other they will both get off because the jury won't be able to decide which is guilty. Or they fall out before the trial and blame each other out of spite. Either way it is an almost guaranteed route to conviction because it appears cowardly and unrealistic. Professional criminals rarely use the cut-throat. Where the evidence is very strong against one and a bit weaker against the other they prefer to sacrifice the one who is going to be potted anyway (in the general run of things his guilty plea earns a reduced sentence). He then gives evidence against the other and enhances his friend's chance of acquittal by making mistakes in his evidence thereby creating a hole in the prosecution case that was not previously present.

Mr Lewis and his friend played it all wrong and will have seven or so years to think of a better defence if ever they are tempted again. They didn't keep their eye on the ball.

It's the court of public opinion again

Some ideas are just bound to result in confusion and disappointment. Today I read of a plan to consult "the community" on various aspects of criminal justice, not as a consultative procedure prior to enacting new laws but as an on-going part of the system of justice. The plan is set out in detail on the Ministry of Justice website (here). At first glance it looks like a lot of well-meaning guff, my fear is that it is rather more dangerous than well-meaning.

It doesn't help that the announcement is framed in management-speak twaddle, including such concepts as "proactive and accessible community-facing district/borough Crown Prosecutors" and "a toolkit ... to raise awareness and streamline processes". Digging through the nonsense, the plan for "community" consultation seems to involve three parts. First, employees of the Crown Prosecution Service will have to consult "the community" when deciding whether to prosecute in particular cases. Secondly, "Community Impact Statements" will be used at all stages of the criminal justice process. And, thirdly, "Citizens' Panels" will be involved in deciding the type of work done by those sentenced to carry out community service.

What isn't said is what "the community" means. Of course it's one of those cuddly words our government likes to use but which doesn't really mean anything and tends to divide people rather than unite them, as I mentioned a few months ago (here). What is it meant to mean in relation to the prosecution of criminal charges? Who counts as part of "the community" for that purpose? Are you disqualified from being consulted if you have a criminal record? Is there one local community when considering theft from shops and another when considering domestic assaults? And what criteria will be sued to select those to be consulted? Will it be for us to put our views forward or will they seek us out? I don't know. But my guess is that we will find special interest groups pressing their positions and the little people being sidelined. So, what of the three proposals themselves?

I have enormous difficulty with the first idea - Crown Prosecutors having to consult the public when deciding whether to prosecute and, if so, for what offence. In any given case either there will be sufficient evidence to justify a prosecution or there will not. The test to be applied cannot change just because "the community" wants more people to be prosecuted for particular types of crime. After all, in the court of public opinion it is not prosecutions that are called for it is convictions. Calls for more prosecutions where the evidence does not justify prosecution are in effect calls for more acquittals and, therefore, for greater public disappointment. No matter how reasonable it may be to demand a crackdown on shoplifting or stabbing, it achieves nothing to prosecute more people only to find that the rate of convictions falls from, say, 70% to 50%; the public perception will, quite rightly, be that the crackdown has backfired.

"Community Impact Statements" are new to me, although the Ministry's website suggests they have been compiled by the police for some time. I can understand them being useful to the police who have to be able to identify particular types of criminal behaviour that are weighing heavily on Mr and Mrs Ordinary in order to adjust their policing strategy to address topical local problem, how well they achieve this is open to debate but in principle it is sensible. How, though, does that affect anything other than policing? It can't affect sentencing otherwise you have convicted people being given potentially radically different sentences in different parts of the country which is fundamentally incompatible with the administration of justice being even-handed. I mustn't overstate that point because the prevalence of a certain type of criminal behaviour in a particular area has been a legitimate consideration for decades and can justify a slightly higher sentence being passed by way of deterrence to others. However, the scope for increasing a sentence on this ground has always been limited otherwise you can find someone being given a substantially greater punishment than his conduct warrants because of what other people have done not because of what he has done, which is wrong in principle.

The third idea might have something going for it but only if it applies in a particular way. There is sense in "the community" identifying worthy projects to benefit from the free work of those serving community sentences. In reality, of course, it will be individuals or existing groups who identify such projects and bring them to the attention of the Probation Service and I can see a benefit to creating a simple channel through which their ideas can be put forward. Selecting which projects are appropriate must remain in the hands of the Probation Service themselves who have to consider the resources they have available for supervision and the suitability of those projects for the unskilled attention of a group of spotty glue-sniffers.

If this whole scheme is pursued with any promise that "the community" will get what it wants there can only be two consequences. Either the lynch-mob will be kept happy, in which case the whole thing will collapse under the weight of the Human Rights Act before you can say "disproportionate"; or the lynch-mob will find itself ignored in which case the system will be held in even greater contempt than it is already. There is no half-way house because there is no way of preventing a promise of contentment from giving rise to a lynch-mob mentality.

Without a promise that "the community" will get what it wants, the exercise can be nothing more than window-dressing.

If we want a true measure of "community" involvement in the criminal justice system we have to look at other things. For more than twenty years criminal charges that were once heard by a jury have been transferred to the exclusive jurisdiction of the Magistrates' Court, that process has accelerated over the last decade. Although lay Magistrates are members of the public rather than of the professional judiciary they are more remote than a jury from Mr and Mrs Ordinary. A further change has taken place with increasing pace over the last five to seven years. There are some Magistrates who are full-time professional judges, they used to be known as Stipendiary Magistrates and are now known as District Judges. In most cases they sit alone without any other Magistrates being involved in the cases, hear the evidence and decide everything that has to be decided. "Stipes", as I will always think of them, generally get through cases much faster than a bench of two or three lay Magistrates and help keep delays down. Most of them are astonishingly good at their job. It cannot be ignored, however, that they are professional judges and their massively increased numbers have removed "the community" from the decision-making process in more and more cases each year.

Against that background it is hard to take seriously the pious pronouncements of the Justice Secretary and the Home Secretary that they are dedicated to the notion of the little people having any serious role in the criminal justice system.

Beyond reasonable doubt , 27 years on

In 1982 a man called Hodgson was convicted of murder. He confessed to killing a woman in 1979 when arrested but pleaded "not guilty" at trial and claimed he was prone to telling lies. DNA tests were science fiction at the time, but blood tests were not and his blood type matched that of the likely murderer. A jury of twelve ordinary people convicted him. In 1983 he appealed against his conviction, relying on technical legal arguments about the conduct of the trial. That appeal failed and he spent twenty seven years in prison. The 18th of March 2009 will probably be the happiest day of his life because his conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal. It was overturned for one reason and one reason only, DNA tests carried out on the physical evidence collected thirty one years before proved that he was not the killer.

The only argument against capital punishment that I have ever found persuasive is that mistakes can be made, even where the state of knowledge at the date of trial admits of no doubt. The other arguments against the death penalty are that it is disproportionately harsh under any circumstances and that it is State-sanctioned murder that is no different from any other murder.

The first argument falls, in my view, when people such as Mussolini and Ceausescu come to be considered. Their executions healed their countries. The evil they perpetrated in ordering campaigns of mass murder created social divisions which dissolved on the very public extinction of the lives of the main perpetrators. Of course they are extreme examples, but the argument I challenge is that capital punishment cannot be allowed because it is always out of proportion to the crime. In such examples I do not believe it is, so the argument of principle must fall.

The second argument simply doesn't get off the starting-blocks. If execution following trial is to be equated to murder then imprisonment following trial must be equated to kidnapping, the imposition of a fine must be equated to theft and a community service penalty must amount to slavery. It's all a complete nonsense because it conflates penalties imposed by society collectively for breaching the most fundamental standards of that society with the standards themselves. Yet they are different things.

No doubt the case of Mr Hodgson will be used by some as a stick to beat the police. They will be entirely wrong. There is no serious suggestion that the police misbehaved in any way. Mr Hodgson had admitted the murder to others before he was even arrested. Sadly, he is one of life's unfortunates who does such things for reasons the rest of us cannot really understand. Even such people know whether they actually did what they admitted. From time to time a case arises in which they are able to find substantive evidence to support that underlying knowledge so that they get a second chance. For Mr Hodgson that chance comes at fifty-seven years of age and after spending almost half his life behind bars.

Mr Hodgson was convicted of murder because the evidence presented at his trial in 1982 satisfied a jury of twelve random citizens of his guilt beyond reasonable doubt. There is no reason to think the jury took the matter lightly. In my few years of work in the criminal courts before I concentrated my career on my abiding love of the law of contract, I appeared in only one murder trial. My client had admitted the offence in a taped interview with his experienced and highly competent solicitor sitting next to him. He pleaded "not guilty" when the case got to the Old Bailey for trial and gave hopelessly weak evidence seeking to extract himself from the overwhelming force of the evidence against him. His position really was utterly hopeless, yet the jury took hours to return a guilty verdict. They had to consider his evidence and discuss whether there might be something to his excuses. They were not wrong to take time because they, and they alone, had to decide whether a young man should be found guilty of a crime that carried a mandatory life sentence. That is a serious responsibility, exactly the same responsibility that was borne by the jury at Mr Hodgson's trial.

"Beyond reasonable doubt" can only ever mean "beyond reasonable doubt according to what we know today". In 1982 DNA was a twinkle in the eye of a Petri dish, today it is the first point of reference in many cases of sexual and/or physical assault. In ten years time we can be pretty sure that current forensic science will look like examining sheep's entrails to find proof of tomorrow's weather. Things always move on. The test for a jury in a criminal case remains the same, it is whether they are satisfied beyond reasonable doubt of the guilt of the defendant. The elements that can cause or dispel doubt do change, hence the long-overdue acquittal of Mr Hodgson.

Had he wiggled his feet beneath a hangman's noose the reversal of this particular miscarriage of justice would have been an empty gesture.

Is "Gordon" criminal damage?

I always read comments about criminal trials through varifocal spectacles. Today's acquittal of a bunch of arrogant vandals charged with criminal damage for painting the Prime Minister's first name on a power station was no surprise. Had they engaged in criminal damage? The mere fact that they admitted daubing paint on private property would seem to prove the case. Is that enough to gain a conviction? Not by any stretch of the imagination. Why not, why is it that a jury can acquit those who freely admit the allegation made against them? The answer is partly legal and partly political.

The legal part is fairly simple and is this - the law is complicated and contradictory. We are all entitled to engage in peaceful protest if that is the course we choose to follow in putting forward our views. An act that might be criminal if done in another context can be rendered lawful if it is part of a peaceful protest. This might seem contradictory, but there is no difficulty in marrying the two legal concepts and there are many examples of it every year.

A demonstration might obstruct the highway, but there is a right to demonstrate (subject, sometimes, to obtaining permission). The offence of obstructing the highway can be outweighed by the right to demonstrate. If the demonstration becomes disorderly, the right to demonstrate can be outweighed by the need to keep the peace. A balance must be struck between the conflicting laws. That balance must first be struck by the police who have to deal with the matter on the ground and if it ends up in court it is then passed to the magistrates, judge or jury who hear the case.

Context is also important. A threatening letter sent to an individual might be construed as an assault, a letter in identical terms to an MP is likely to be viewed as part of the rough-and-tumble of political debate. It is, I suggest, right to draw a distinction between ten burly men marching on Joe Miggin's house and shouting "Death to Joe Miggins" and the same ten men marching to the Labour Party Conference and shouting "Death to Gordon Brown". One is a threat against an individual where there is no public interest in allowing the threat to be made, the other is a political demonstration.

The protest made by painting "Gordon" on a power plant involved both a clash of laws and an issue of context. It was for the jury to decide whether the law against slopping paint on someone else's property was outweighed by the right to demonstrate and it was for the jury to decide whether the context in which it was done was such that it should not be viewed as an unlawful act.

In addition there is a defence of "lawful excuse". This allows damage to be done if it prevents a greater threat from manifesting itself. It is a favourite defence of extremist nutters who perceive a fanciful risk of some catastrophe and vandalise the property of those they claim to be responsible for it. I do not know whether it was used in this case but it would not surprise me if it was.

I asked myself what I would have done had I been on the jury. Obviously I did not hear the evidence so my decision could be based only on what I have read and heard about the case. Part of me would want the Defendants to be sectioned under the Mental Health Acts for believing in the absurd theory of man-made global warming, part of me would want them imprisoned for the same dangerous idiocy. Part of me would want them acquitted because they did minimal damage while expressing views they probably hold deeply, part of me would want them convicted for going too far in making their point. Part of me would want them convicted because the act complained of added nothing to the debate, part of me would want them acquitted because it is not for me to judge whether it added anything to the debate.

And so we arrive at the political answer to the question I posed. Jury trials are not about applying the law strictly. Jury trials are part of our inefficient, deeply flawed and even more deeply ingrained system of democracy. Once every four or five years we can vote in a general election but that is not the only part we little people play in the governance of our country. We can vote also in local elections, we can lobby politicians, write articles on issues that interest us and engage in many forms of debate, all of which have the potential of affecting decisions made by those with power. We can also express our views if selected for jury service. There are very few cases each year which throw up matters of political interest but that was not always so.

Many years ago sheep rustling was a capital offence. The penalty was so out of proportion to the crime that juries regularly acquitted no matter how strong the prosecution's case. They exercised a political judgment, they decided that the law was unjust and rendered verdicts accordingly. Some argue that they had no right to do so but I disagree. The juror's oath is to "reach a true verdict according to the evidence". That phrase is not defined for the jurors, it is for them to construe it according to their consciences and judgment. If the jury thinks the law is unjust the true verdict might be "not guilty".

We will never know the reasons each individual juror had for voting for an acquittal in the case of painting Gordon. Perhaps one of them felt the right to demonstrate outweighed the property rights of the owners of the power station, maybe another thought the property in question was sufficiently public to justify its use for a political slogan, one might have considered man-made global warming to be such an important matter that any act done ostensibly in its prevention is justified, another might have felt it wrong for these protesters to be prosecuted when others who commit serious crimes are let off, yet another might have viewed the demonstrators as pathetic inadequates who deserve pity, and another again might have felt it best not to make martyrs of the haplessly selfish. There could have been a hundred or more reasons for the acquittals.

You can call it a perverse verdict if you wish. I am inclined to the view that it was an example of jurors doing what they do every day, returning what they considered to be "a true verdict". And let all commentators about the case realise one thing - the decision was not in the hands of experts with a special interest to promote, nor was it in the hands of politicians with an electorate to woo, nor was it in the hands of technocrats who look only at black-letter law, it was in the hands of a random dozen picked from the electoral roll. Only those twelve people had the right to decide the case. You might think they were wrong, but they were not wrong because they were the only people in the world with the right and duty to decide the case.