Welcome to Jury Nullification in the 21st Century

A VICTORY FOR JURY NULLIFICATION 🥳

Welcome to The Teledyne Defence ©️

If you go the High Court you will see a plaque celebrating William Penn’s victory to allow the jury to rule according to their conscience after the court jailed them for 2 days without food and water ( and presumably internet access as well )

For those of you who have been rightly concerned about the lack of the ability to demand try by jury, this case demonstrates why there is such fierce resistance within the court process to allowing defendants to invoke their constitutional rights to trial by jury.

This article does not condone criminal damage but serves to highlight what happens when a defendant is allowed to make a plea directly to the jury which a barrister would ordinarily be prevented from doing under their duties to the court and direction from the judge. It would seem from this case that barristers were denied the opportunity to call upon the jury to consider whether the law itself was just and nullify it by acquitting the defendants if their conscience decided that the law was unjust which would have been in opposition to directions from the judge who is usually hell bent on limiting the scope of the verdict to be based upon strict and blind compliance with the law as it is written and not whether the law itself was just in the circumstances.

Despite this article being very partisan and biased against Israel ( which the reader can ignore if they wish ) it does seem to report the bare bones of the important legal considerations fairly well and states that crucially that 3 out of 4 defendants fired their barristers before summing up in order to make the closing arguments themselves which in this case was successful as the jury refused to deliver a verdict which meant that the 4 were not convicted. However there was no finality to this case and naturally the CPS is desperate to plug this loophole and has indicated they will attempt to retry the case and subject the defendants to double jeopardy. Presumably the judge was powerless to prevent the defendants representing themselves but managed to do enough to save their own skin to persuade the jury to return no verdict rather than an acquittal which may turn out to be pivotal in the long run when the CPS try the case again.

This case may eventually turn out to be a Pyrric victory but it does demonstrate that firing your barrister before summing up in order to make a direct appeal to the conscience of the jury can be a winning strategy if only in the short term, however this strategy can only be implemented when the case is allocated to the Crown Court and remembering that the defendants spent months in jail awaiting trial.

In the meantime a very small light is on at the end of the tunnel.

https://www.thecanary.co/uk/news/2024/09/15/palestine-action-shipley/