“May we explain? Why the Filton case may prove to be the trial of the century,” by Peter Hallward, is a Communis original feature.

“The central question at issue in the present essay, and arguably the central question at issue in our wider politico-judicial moment, is to what extent does an activist or protestor, or indeed anyone at all, have a legally sanctioned right to explain why they believe they did the right thing?”

— Peter Hallward

Why the Filton case may prove to be the trial of the century[1]

On 12 June 2026 a British court is likely to attach a “terrorism connection” to the sentencing of four Palestine Action protestors, even though they were not charged, tried or convicted under terrorism laws. Two successive trials have demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that these Palestine Action protestors set out to save lives rather than threaten them, and two successive juries have agreed that none of those who are about to be sentenced called for or intended violence of any kind. On 12 June such exoneration is unlikely to protect them, however, from being punished with unprecedented severity.

Prosecuted for causing criminal damage to an Israeli weapons factory, during their second trial in particular these protestors were not allowed to explain properly to the jury why they set out to damage it. Their lawyers were expressly prohibited from developing any pertinent lines of defence, and were eventually obliged to withdraw from the trial. Their jury was not allowed to hear anything like the full truth of the case they were summoned to adjudicate. Not only were the defendants prevented from discussing in any detail their own actual motives and intentions with the jury, the judge who is now about to sentence them is instead poised to attribute entirely different, totally incongruous and indeed utterly defamatory motives to them: four highly principled non-violent peace activists, determined to act directly on our shared obligation to prevent genocide, may instead now be condemned and imprisoned as “terrorists.” In Keir Starmer’s Britain, it now seems that in one and the same case, defendants can be convicted of one thing but then sentenced for another.

The campaigning website Council Estate Media sums up the situation in a nutshell: in the UK ruled by the likes of Keir Starmer, Yvette Cooper and Shabana Mahmood, in a UK that remains allied to the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, “you can now be jailed as a terrorist, despite not committing a terror offence, not being charged with a terror offence, and not being convicted of a terror offence. Even worse, the jury can’t be told that you’ll be sentenced as a terrorist for your non-terror offence.”

The jury can’t be told and the defendants cannot tell. This is the crux of the matter. Activists accused of resorting to civil disobedience or direct action are no longer allowed to talk to a jury about the reasons that led them to do what they chose to do, and a jury is no longer permitted to listen to such reasons or intentions — perhaps because such reasons, when it comes to opposing genocide or saving lives, might strike most people as rather compelling. Defendants accused of direct action are no longer permitted to defend their actions. Even to call people put in such positions “defendants” now sounds rather out of date.

Operating in conjunction with representatives of the British, American and Israeli arms industry, today’s UK government — observed the civil liberties group Defend Our Juries on 31 May — is now effectively “colluding with Israel to imprison its own citizens.” If Keir Starmer’s judiciary is allowed to get away with such a brazenly authoritarian abuse of power, it may soon spell the end of all political protest worthy of the name. If an ordinary act of criminal damage to property can be reframed as “terrorism” because it was motivated by clear moral and political principles, then all kinds of conscientious protest are now vulnerable to state repression. As Defend Our Juries explains, “if this goes through, a terrible precedent will be set,” creating a “situation characteristic of the most authoritarian states: people taking proportionate action to expose the crimes of the powerful, convicted on the basis of stitched-up trials, then sentenced as if they were guilty of the most heinous crimes.”

I

The basic facts of the Filton case are already well known, and are clearly outlined on an informative website set up by friends and relatives of the defendants. The name Filton refers to the location of the most recent UK-based investment of Israel’s biggest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems. Elbit Systems today “provides up to 85 percent of the land-based equipment procured by the Israeli military and about 85 percent of its drones, according to the Database of Israeli Military and Security Export.” Thanks to their constant deployment in Palestine over many years, Elbit can regularly advertise its products as “combat ready and combat proven solutions.” In July 2023, with the Israeli ambassador in attendance, Elbit opened a new state-of-the-art “research and development” facility, called “Horizon”, in the Filton suburb of Bristol.

By the time Elbit Systems UK opened its new flagship factory on the outskirts of Bristol it was already well acquainted with the campaigning group Palestine Action. Palestine Action was created in 2020 precisely in order to shut Elbit down. Palestine Action’s longer-term goal is to stop the genocide and end Israel’s occupation of Palestine; its more local and immediate strategy is to organise forms of direct action — typically including things like temporary obstruction, blockades, pickets, occupations, sit-ins, rooftop defiance, graffiti, acts of minor vandalism, and so on — that might soon make it impossible for Elbit to continue making munitions in the UK. The priority has been kinds of action that everyone can do, each in their own way, thereby setting an example that anyone else might follow or join. The aim is to build up the movement’s momentum until it proves too powerful to contain.

Palestine Action’s choice of forceful means to a peaceful end resonated with many Palestine solidarity campaigners, and their strategy soon proved highly successful. In January 2022, Pal Action announced that after eighteen months of sustained pressure and repeated occupations of the Elbit-Ferranti factory in Oldham, Elbit had decided to cut their losses, cease production and sell Ferranti Technologies to TT Electronics. Six months later, after “disrupting business by blockading, occupying and defacing the property” on fifteen successive occasions, Pal Action could report that Elbit had also decided to abandon its London Headquarters. In March 2024, Pal Action further announced that Elbit Systems had been forced to sell off their “Elite KL” factory in Tamworth. The Guardian subsequently reported that “Elbit System UK’s latest accounts show that it made an operating loss of £4.7m [in 2024], compared with a profit of £3.8m in 2023.”

In the early hours of 6 August 2024 — long after the UN’s special rapporteur and a number of prominent human rights groups had concluded that Israel was clearly perpetrating genocide in Gaza — six Palestine Action activists broke into Elbit’s Filton factory, and set about destroying as much military equipment as they could. In particular they dismantled a number of quadcopter drones, a kind of drone that Israel has regularly used in Gaza, most notably in order to murder children or their parents.

The six Filton activists were quickly and violently arrested at the scene along with a few others who were apprehended, sometimes by armed police conducting dawn raids, at other locations; later that same day the police re-arrested them and re-characterised their case by suggesting it involved a vaguely worded “terrorist connection.” This was a dramatic first in the prosecution of Palestine Action activists, and it allowed the police to detain the Filton defendants without charge for around a week, more or less incommunicado, before eventually charging them with (non-terror-connected) offences like criminal damage, violent disorder and aggravated burglary.[2] “The Filton activists were not ultimately charged under the Terrorism Act,” explains Declassified UK, “but the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) later announced it would submit to the court that the first case being tried against the Filton activists had a ‘terrorism connection’ under the Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Act. This marked the first time that such provisions had been used against activists — and seemed to prepare the groundwork for the proscription of Palestine Action as a whole.” The UK’s Counter-Terrorism police dubbed their pursuit of Palestine Action “Operation Recomply.”

As is also well known, the scope and reach of the UK government’s prosecution of Palestine Action was dramatically expanded when Keir Starmer’s Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, encouraged by representatives of the Israeli government and of British and Israeli weapons manufacturers (including the influential “independent” advisor on political violence John Woodcock, ennobled as Lord Walney), duly decided on 5 July 2025 to proscribe the group itself as a terrorist organisation.[3] Following Cooper’s widely condemned and widely ridiculed decision to ban Palestine Action (in the surreal company of the Maniacs Murder Cult and another far-right group), thousands of people have been arrested simply for holding harmless placards expressing opposition to genocide and therefore support for Pal Action. (Since I sketched a detailed chronology of this fateful proscription in a related article for Communis last summer I won’t go back over that story here).

I’ll discuss a few aspects of the Filton trial in more detail later in this essay, but it’s worth bearing in mind several preliminary things about the context in which it took place.

First of all, as already hinted, the sentences that will be handed down on 12 June will end not the first but the second trial of these initial Filton defendants (who are themselves only the first of several sets of defendants, who currently number 25 in all). Their first trial began in November 2025, under slightly less stringent conditions; after hearing their highly effective defence barristers summarise at least some of the reasons for the Filton operation, and after being reminded of a jury’s unconditional right to make up its own mind and reach its own verdict, on 4 February 2026 the jury pointedly refused to convict any of the accused on any charge. They acquitted them of the most serious charges, and left the relatively minor accusation of criminal damage undecided. Government prosecutors immediately decided to try all six defendants again, mainly on this one remaining charge of criminal damage.

As for the semi-covert accusation of “terrorism” that has shadowed the open charge of criminal damage, it’s essential to understand that the UK’s Terrorism Act of 2000 defines it in terms broad enough to include both the use or threat of “serious violence against a person” and also “serious damage to property.” UK prosecutors can treat criminal damage as terrorism if they believe it was “designed to influence the government (or an international governmental organisation) or to intimidate the public or a section of the public.” Echoing concerns regularly expressed by civil rights groups, on 1 July 2025, i.e. just before Home Secretary Yvette Cooper proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist group, several UN special rapporteurs for the promotion and protection of human rights (including Francesca Albanese, Irene Khan, Gina Romero and Ben Saul) wrote to discourage her from doing so. They condemned “the unjustified labelling of a political protest movement as ‘terrorist,’” and reminded her that “best practice international standards limit [definitions of] terrorism to criminal acts intended to cause death, serious personal injury or hostage taking. […] Protest actions that are not genuinely ‘terrorist’, but which involve alleged property damage, should be properly investigated as ordinary crimes or other security offences.”[4]

The legality of Cooper’s proscription of Palestine Action has been contested in British courts and universities as well. As things stand, the most authoritative legal judgement of Cooper’s ban — a ruling issued by the High Court in London on 13 February 2026 — found her proscription to be an “unlawful” restriction on our basic freedoms of speech and assembly. (On that same day 13 February London’s Metropolitan police duly announced they would at last stop arresting perfectly peaceful people for expressing support for Palestine Action — only to begin abruptly re-arresting them a month later, without giving any sort of explanation for this change in policy). Since proscription of Palestine Action and the criminalisation of any direct action against Israel’s genocide is clearly a top priority of the current government, the current Home Secretary immediately decided to appeal against the High Court’s unwelcome (if somewhat tepid) ruling, and after weeks of deliberation, this Court of Appeal announced that they would publish their own decision on Monday 15 June.

The decision to sentence the Filton defendants specifically on Friday 12 June 2026 thus means that their punishments will be decided a couple of days in advance of the Court of Appeal’s ruling on the legality of Cooper’s decision to proscribe the group to which they belong. In other words, on 12 June the Filton trial judge may sentence the defendants as “terrorists” just before the appeal court has decided whether or not the organisation to which they belong is or is not itself actually “terrorist.”

This is all happening, finally, as a substantial new report produced by Defend Our Juries and London’s Centre for Climate Crime and Climate Justice demonstrates in detail, at a time when successive UK governments have already consolidated extraordinary new powers to discourage anyone who is still courageous enough to participate in civil disobedience and direct action. In the UK imprisonment for such action used to be very unusual, but “custodial sentences are now being imposed with rising length and frequency” and since 2019 no fewer than 286 climate and Palestine solidarity protestors have been imprisoned for periods that, on average, exceed six months. One in five of these protestors have been jailed for more than a year. Over the last few years, notes one of the report’s authors (Queen Mary Law Professor David Whyte), there has been “a remarkable shift in how protest is being policed and punished in Britain. Our findings show the routine use of remand exceeding statutory time limits. Exceptionally high levels of contempt proceedings and custodial sentencing in response to acts of civil disobedience and direct action show that the courts are progressively degrading the right to protest,” even though the new political prisoners being locked up “are reflecting a majority rather than a minority view.”[5]

Before 2019 political prisoners were still a rarity in Britain but these days there are scores of them — precisely at a time when the escalating catastrophes of genocide and climate collapse are becoming more and more difficult to deny.

Whatever happens when the Filton defendants are sentenced on 12 June, the consequences may shape English the legal and political landscape for years to come. As the co-founder of Palestine Action Huda Ammori said at a Filton campaign meeting on 19 May 2026, for Starmer’s increasingly repressive government “this is the first case, and therefore the test case, for convicting activists taking direct action as terrorists. If it isn’t successfully challenged, any protestor can then face one charge at court but secretly be imprisoned as terrorists. This is more outrageous than the proscription of Palestine Action, it is insidious political manipulation of the court system.” If the Filton trial judge “sentences the defendants as terrorists,” echoes a collective statement signed by a number of prominent lawyers and law professors, this would clearly “violate basic legal principles.”

II

Before we can assess what’s at stake in the Filton trials we first need to consider some of these basic legal principles, along with some concepts that are both somewhat familiar yet somewhat arcane — concepts like necessity defence, jury equity, jury nullification, and mens rea.[6]

Part of what makes it difficult to write about any of this in a way that is both short enough to read yet substantial enough to explain what might be going on is that what’s at stake is indeed truly enormous. These stakes begin with our most basic understanding of law itself. Leaving aside a whole cluster of issues bound up with ideas of “natural law,” how should we understand the relation between the more narrow or “judicial” sense of law (i.e. the rules that define what counts as a crime in a court of law) and its more expansive or “legislative” sense (i.e. the laws passed by legislating bodies like Parliament or Congress)? Who should make and lay down the law? At the most elementary level, should it be a relatively privileged and wealthy group of people, people who might have a particular interest in the rights of property, and thus also in things like inheritance, custom, precedent, and so on? Or in principle should it be everyone and anyone, here and now, without any particular concern for privilege or precedent at all?

Should the process of law-making, in other words, be essentially aristocratic or democratic? However much the former might try to pass itself off as the latter, this is a genuine either-or alternative; fundamental law-making authority can either belong in some sense to the people as a whole or else to a select few of them. It cannot belong to both at once. It’s no accident that a great deal of modern political thought, ever since the days of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes, and indeed well before them, has been preoccupied by discussions about how best to make sure that, one way or another, one and only one duly authorised actor (be it monarch or assembly or court) is invested with the supreme authority to command obedience and enforce the law.

I hope it can go without saying here that, historically, the laws of a thoroughly hierarchical and unequal country like Britain have been made by its ruling classes, and consequently reflect their main interests and priorities. This clearly applies as much to the ‘micro’ history of common law (as prescribed, cumulatively, over the centuries, by those land-owning magnates who typically served as magistrates and justices of the peace) as it does to the ‘macro’ history of legislation or public law (as decided, again cumulatively, by the collective body initially set up to represent the interests of landed property — that elaborate institutional coordination of “Crown, Lords and Commons” — which evolved into the parliament that governs the country to this day).

What complicates this history is the fact that, sometimes, mass collective pressure can indeed set real limits on elite rule. This too can happen on both the macro and micro levels. If enough people mobilise to act and vote in a certain way, parliamentary sovereignty can blur into something more like genuine popular sovereignty: the interests of a few can sometimes be forced to yield to the demands of the many. In the smaller and more tightly regulated space of a courtroom the same possibility arises every time twelve ordinary and randomly chosen people gather to decide on a verdict. Though obviously too big a topic to address here,[7] the links between popular sovereignty and jury trial stretch back at least as far as their combined institution in ancient Athens, and one way or another the two issues interconnect all the way through the long and constrained history of democracy in Britain.

Sovereign power is typically and helpfully understood as the ultimate power of command: a sovereign actor is one who can make and then “lay down” a binding imperative or law by all the means its enforcement requires. A classical theorist of sovereignty like Hobbes can then explain, in terms that remain highly pertinent to this day, that a law is thus best understood as “the declared will of the Sovereign.”[8] For thinkers like Hobbes and later Rousseau (to say nothing of world-making revolutionaries in France, Russia or Cuba…), sovereign command or law is simply “an instruction in which the reason for following it is drawn from the will of the instructor,” an instruction that requires no “other reason than the will of him that says it.”[9] Thus understood, law is an expression of political will, and of course every will has its reasons — but what makes a law a law, i.e. a binding imperative rather than a matter of custom or counsel, is that these willed reasons suffice. The ultimate lawfulness of such an instruction doesn’t depend on the instructor’s arguments for giving it (since arguments can always be challenged); what makes an authority distinctively sovereign is precisely its status as the actually highest or ultimate source of law, the most imperative power of command.

At the risk of exaggerating things a little, one helpful way of thinking about juries is as an institution that is temporarily authorised to exercise something like sovereign power, albeit only within a carefully and narrowly prescribed context. Juries are a bit like micro-sovereigns in a partial straitjacket. A jury is only summoned to judge a single case, and to issue a single verdict or set of verdicts. All sorts of restrictions are typically placed on the way these cases can be argued, and on the sorts of factors the jury is allowed to take into consideration. Nevertheless, juries still exercise an extraordinary indeed altogether exceptional kind of power. For one thing, they are authorised or rather required to exercise this power collectively, i.e. via shared deliberation — rather like votes taken by revolutionary assemblies or old-fashioned trade unions, their decision is meant to be the fruit of discussion and consensus, rather the sum of individual opinions conveyed by private or secret ballot. In the US and the UK, furthermore, the constitution and hard-won legal rights both protect the secrecy of jury deliberations and guard jurors against retribution for whatever verdict they give. In particular, it remains a remarkable fact (for the time being!) that, barring very exceptional circumstances, no politician or judge has the power to overturn or even question a jury’s decision to acquit. No-one can challenge what a jury decides, and no one can even ask them to reveal what happened over the course of their deliberations. In this sense, at least, familiar accounts of sovereignty and jury equity converge in principle — neither ‘macro’ nor ‘micro’ sovereigns, so to speak, are required to expose their reasoning to counter-arguments. For anyone who affirms the principle of sovereignty, be it macro or micro, the final or highest or law-enforcing command is indeed precisely that: final.

If they choose to exercise it, juries have the power, in effect, to suspend application of the law, and so by implication to “nullify” the lawfulness of an existing law. Jury power, in short, might in principle pose a direct challenge to the government or legislators of the day — and for that very reason, the judicial system typically goes to a lot of trouble to discourage or prevent juries from exercising their power to its full extent.

Again, at the risk of exaggerating things a little, there’s a way then in which a jury, whenever it issues a verdict that’s clearly at odds with the preferences of a government, engages in a sort of “lawful” and localised act of rebellion against this government. Such a verdict has a tacitly seditious effect, and there’s a way in which it echoes, at a local level, the sort of revolutionary challenges that might lead, at the national level, to a change in the governing i.e. legislative or law-making authority altogether. As even a cautiously liberal philosopher like John Locke could see, from a general law-making point of view there’s a way in which any legitimate constitution is obliged to acknowledge what might be called “popular judicial power” as the ultimate source of authority. A jury made up of a few people has the power to defy a judge; the people as a whole can rightfully defy and if necessary rebel against their government. Though Locke doesn’t make this point himself, jury and people can exercise such powers for essentially the same reason, i.e. because they can always — if indeed they will it — lay direct claim to law-making power themselves. Governments and legislators are appointed by the people to serve the people, not the other way around. So, the governmental or “legislative [power] being only a fiduciary power to act for certain ends,” writes Locke in a famous passage of his Second Treatise on Government about the people’s collective right to rebel, “there remains still in the people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative, when they find the legislative act contrary to the trust reposed in them […]. And thus, the community perpetually retains a supreme power of saving themselves from the attempts and designs of any body, even of their legislators, whenever they shall be so foolish or so wicked as to lay and carry on designs” that might threaten the fundamental liberties and interests of the people themselves. Rousseau (to say nothing of Danton or Robespierre) expands on this crucial point in his world-changing discussion of The Social Contract (1762). The mid-century British appellate court judge Patrick Devlin risked evoking similar territory when he described the practice of “jury nullification” (to which I’ll come in a moment) as “a nuclear power which unharnessed could destroy the state. It is like strychnine, a deadly poison which in small doses is a stimulant,” in large doses lethal.[10]

As far as Britain’s ruling classes are concerned, the most obviously revolutionary implications of popular rebellion in both its macro and micro dimensions hit home in roughly the same prolonged historical moment. In the 1640s, both parliamentary and popular resistance to Charles I’s pig-headed abuse of power triggered the civil wars that led to his execution and the temporary establishment of an English republic whose initially “levelling” spirit inspired English revolutionaries for generations to come. It’s no coincidence that the prominent (and repeatedly indicted) Leveller John Lilburne applauded juries (in libertarian terms that would inspire some American revolutionaries in the 1770s) as “judges of law as well as fact”. Soon after the national-level republican experiment was contained and partially reversed, however, the year 1670 witnessed perhaps the single most important assertion of the principle of “jury equity,” i.e. the idea (affirmed via the defiance of Edward Bushel and his associates) that jurors have an absolute right to make up their own mind, on their own terms, regarding the case that confronts them. I’ll return to the landmark Bushel case of 1670 in more detail below, in the company of Filton defence barrister Rajiv Menon.

Whether it is exercised within the narrow confines or a court or opens onto the expansive horizons of trans-national revolution, we should never forget how dramatically transformative such popular claims on law-making power can be. Judges and governments certainly never forget this, and it’s easy to understand that, as a general rule, the more a government is determined to enforce obedience and repress protest, the more likely it is to impose stricter limits on what juries are authorised to do. As we’ll see this is very much the case today, in Keir Starmer’s Britain. Keir Starmer was himself once a human rights lawyer, and acquired some experience of crafting defence arguments for juries — but that was apparently a long time ago.

When the historian and activist E.P. Thompson wrote in defence of jury trial forty years ago he already did so in elegiac mode, celebrating it as “perhaps the last place in our social organisation where any person, any citizen, may be called upon to perform a fully adult role.” This last place was already besieged, in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, by what Thompson called a growing contempt in ruling circles for “two basic propositions of democracy […:] The first is that there could be occasions when laws are judged by the public to be oppressive, or when the subject requires a defence against the Crown (or organs of the state),” while “the second proposition is beyond the comprehension not only of our betters but of almost any of us in these latter days. It is the quaint archaic notion that anyone — randomly selected — might be able to perform a human sized office or role.”[11]

In Keir Starmer’s Britain, the constraints put upon what remains of this role have become arguably more restrictive and oppressive than ever before.

III

Before returning to consider the Filton case in more detail it might be helpful to change contexts, and to take a moment to consider the single most basic legal question at issue here in the light of a recent case that has nothing to do with any of the controversies that might surround allegations of terrorism or reference to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine.

In June 2023, following a model developed by the group Direct Action Everywhere, UC Berkeley student and animal rights campaigner Zoe Rosenberg and several other activists undertook an “open rescue” of four chickens in Sonoma County, California. They broke into a Petaluma Poultry slaughterhouse in order to remove this token number of birds, before placing them in an animal sanctuary. (Petaluma is a subsidiary of the massive industrial meat processing conglomerate Perdue). Rosenberg made no secret of what she did, or of her reasons for doing it. “It’s not a whodunit” her lawyer tried to explain in the run-up to her trial in 2025, “it’s really a whydunit. Zoe believed that this conduct was permissible under the circumstances.” When the case went to trial this past autumn, it made headlines across the United States.

Given a chance to explain her actions, as you might expect Zoe Rosenberg has a lot to say. After repeatedly investigating them, she can readily provide a detailed description of the appalling conditions characteristic of the Petaluma facilities, in which she found tens of thousands of “chickens crowded together in filthy barns. One facility had mortality rates more than double the industry standard. Birds were suffering from severe neglect and dying from blood infections caused by multidrug-resistant bacteria. […] One night, in April 2023, over 1,000 chickens from one shipment were condemned post-slaughter when workers opened them up and found their bodies full of infection.” And so on.

Nevertheless, after an eight-week trial, in October 2025 Zoe Rosenberg was convicted on both a felony charge of conspiracy and on three misdemeanour charges, including trespassing with the intent to disrupt a lawful business. Two months later a judge sentenced her to ninety days imprisonment and a fine of more than $100,000, payable to Petaluma Poultry. “Sonoma county spent over six weeks and hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars,” commented her lawyer, “to protect a multibillion-dollar corporation from the rescue of four chickens worth less than $25.” Rosenberg became only the third animal activist in the US to be imprisoned, ironically enough, for taking part in an open rescue.

Though we can only speculate about the jury’s deliberations, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the main reason Rosenberg was convicted is because she wasn’t allowed to refer to the intentions or motives that actually inspired her actions. She and her lawyer were prevented, by the judge, from making any of the defence arguments that might have persuaded a jury to let her off. More precisely, in the semi-technical terminology of the courts, she was deprived of making a “necessity defence” — the sort of defence that is typically associated with the principle of “lesser harm” (or in more English-English parlance, a defence based on “lawful excuse”). In this case, the basic idea is that an isolated act of petty theft is no doubt illegal in the narrow sense of the term, but it might nevertheless be justifiable or “just” if it could be construed as helping to put an end to much greater forms of suffering and wrong-doing, e.g. systematic cruelty to animals on an industrial scale.

IV

The rather peculiarly worded notions of “necessity defence” and “lawful excuse” call for a little further discussion.

In the British and American legal systems, someone accused of a crime can only draw on a very limited and specific range of possible lines of defence, and before they present any particular line of argument to a jury, they must first get permission to make it, from the judge. Basically, if the accused cannot or do not want to argue that they are simply innocent of the charges (in other words, if they don’t want to argue that they didn’t actually do what they stand accused of doing, e.g. of taking some chickens or breaking into a factory), they might perhaps try to attenuate their responsibility by arguing that, at the time, they weren’t in their right mind. In that case they might try to argue that, at the time, they had been insane, or intoxicated, or under duress. These are all legally recognised lines of defence, and if one of them is adopted, with the judge’s approval, it’s then up to the defence to prove its validity.

In certain very specific circumstances, those accused of a crime might instead argue that, although undeniably guilty of e.g. damage or trespass, and though also clearly in their right mind, their action was nevertheless justified by its self-evident necessity and urgency — and in that sense, not really guilty. The most obvious examples would be self-defence in the face of immediate attack, or the committing of a minor infringement in order to prevent an obviously greater harm. Textbook accounts sometimes illustrate the point with a scenario in which someone, noticing that a person is drowning in their neighbour’s pool, commits the crime of trespass in order to save this person from imminent death. The undeniable crime of trespass might be lawfully excused in such a case if it is committed in order to prevent something much more serious from taking place.

Typically, if a judge is to give them permission to make a necessity defence, the accused has to be able to show that they or another person were in immediate danger, that they had no viable alternative, and that whatever offence they might have committed was clearly less harmful than the one they avoided by committing it. In the run-up to Rosenberg’s 2025 trial, some animal rescuers did successfully manage to mount necessity defences, drawing among other things on a carefully argued Amicus brief from Harvard Law professor Kristen Stilt.[12]

In Zoe Rosenberg’s case, on 30 June 2025 judge Kenneth J. Gnoss flatly denied her lawyer’s request to defend her along such lines. Gnoss rejected any suggestion that “the defence of necessity should be extended to nonhuman situations where imminent death or injury to a human is not involved. There are times when the risk of harm to a person is so great and so immediate, that the law can be broken,” he continued, “but to extend that to situations where the harm is to nonhuman beings would not be appropriate and would open the flood gates and allow individuals to violate the law whenever they disagreed with regulatory or governmental outcomes.” Judge Gnoss wasn’t satisfied, furthermore, “that the defendant has pursued administrative remedies as an alternative to her criminal acts,” or that her actions could be justified on the grounds of lesser harm. “The defendant’s acts of forcibly entering the processing plant on multiple occasions,” Gnoss concluded,

along with the taking of property resulting in a temporary shutdown of the facility and possible contamination of the facility, created a dangerous situation that was greater than the one to be avoided. […] The defendant’s actions on the early morning hours were well planned, organized and carried out with the other co-offenders and were not the type of action contemplated by a necessity defence to deal with an immediate harm or threat.

As a result of judge Gnoss’s ruling, Rosenberg was effectively gagged during her own trial. “I was not allowed to talk about the conditions on the factory farms that send the chickens to Perdue’s Petaluma Poultry slaughterhouse,” she explained after she was sentenced in December 2025. “I was not allowed to show any photos or videos from those farms, either,” and she was prevented from “speaking in any detail about documents from the slaughterhouse that showed birds were dying in transportation, arriving with infections and bruises, and even being boiled alive, during the slaughter process, due to negligence.” During her trial Rosenberg was prevented, in short, from trying to justify her actions by referring to her actual or most deeply held intentions.

It’s not that her trial went ahead without any reference to motives and intentions at all — the point is that, once the judge had gagged the defendant and her lawyer, it was left to the prosecution alone to address this side of the case. “Without Rosenberg’s evidence relevant to a necessity defense,” notes the prominent legal scholar Michael Dorf, “her trial focused on intent, trespass, and property-protection narratives crafted by the prosecutors.” The prosecution argued, among other things, that Rosenberg was guilty of trespass “with the intent to disrupt a lawful business” — and in judge Gnoss’s court, they won this argument. Needless to say, the meat industry lobby was delighted by the outcome. As reported by porkbusiness.com, the CEO of the Animal Agriculture Alliance celebrated the court’s recognition that “the crimes committed by DxE extremist Zoe Rosenberg are just that — crimes. This decision is a reinforcement that laws must be followed and cannot be bent because of extreme beliefs and ideologies.”

More precisely, the court’s decision reinforced the idea that laws must be followed in two symmetrical ways. On the one hand, it confirmed that activists like Rosenberg must respect the rules that legalise industrial farming, with all its attendant consequences for animal welfare. Within the narrow confines of criminal law, activists have no legally sanctioned right to judge whether they think existing laws are in fact just, and so they cannot use a court trial to argue against the legitimacy of such laws. Once confined to a courtroom, they cannot speak in their own defence. On the other hand, and just as importantly, the court’s ruling also confirmed that a jury should not listen to such defendants. It confirmed and consolidated the legal system’s prevailing aversion to the prospect of “jury nullification” — the possibility that jurors might themselves come to think and deliberate like political activists, in effect, and perhaps then refuse to enforce laws they don’t actually agree with. (In the UK, this possibility is secured by the hard-won but long-standing principle of jury equity, which I’ll come to in a moment).

V

Since the practice of jury nullification is both crucially important and profoundly contested, before we can move on it too requires a parenthetical word of explanation. In principle, a jury can effectively suspend or nullify application of a law whenever they accept a defendant is indeed guilty as charged yet nevertheless opt to exercise their (legally recognised) power to acquit. A jury can do this if they believe the law they have been asked to enforce is unfair, or, as a standard summary puts it, if they come to “feel that the defendant doesn’t deserve to be punished under unjust laws.” Technically, what a jury thereby nullifies is the application of a particular law to a particular defendant, but in the very process of doing so the jurors may also imply (or perhaps openly declare) that the law in question might itself be immoral or unjust. The practice of jury nullification thus opens up a wide spectrum of non-compliance, from a limited reluctance to apply a generally-reasonable law to a particular case to full-blown suggestions that a law should be struck down entirely.[13] Since jury deliberations take place in secret and cannot be challenged, it’s not always clear where any particular verdict should be placed on this spectrum.

American examples of such nullification stretch back to a landmark case of seditious libel in 1735 and include, most famously, the repeated refusals of juries in northern states in the 1850s to convict abolitionists charged with helping enslaved people to escape. Such acquittals made the deeply unpopular Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 effectively unenforceable, and it’s clear that many of the jurors involved believed that slavery in general was wrong and that this Act in particular was abominable; in one such case, notes public interest attorney Jordan Paul, the jury “argued that if a juror believed the law to be unconstitutional, they were ‘bound by their oaths to disregard any direction to the contrary which the court might give them.’” American juries also often refused to convict defendants accused of violating alcohol or drug prohibition laws, and, Paul adds, “Vietnam War-era juries nullified in cases where the charges included conspiring to obstruct operations at a draft center, destroying draft files, and blocking trains carrying bombs.” (All-white juries in the Jim Crow South, it should also be added, also regularly refused to convict white defendants who were clearly guilty of violent crimes against African-American people — though such abuses of jury trials don’t so much undermine the legitimacy of the practice as draw attention to the obviously crucial need to ensure that no criteria of exclusion apply to jury composition).[14]

In the first decades of American independence the autonomy of juries was widely affirmed. The country’s first Chief Justice, John Jay, told jurors in 1794 (in Georgia v. Brailsford), “you have a right to take upon yourselves to judge” both the facts of a case and the validity of the law that frames it, “to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy.” The second American president, John Adams, likewise acknowledged (in a diary entry of 1771) that it is not only a juror’s “right, but his duty […], to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.” Similar sentiments were voiced by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and Samuel Chase. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the US in the 1830s the American jury still struck him (within his characteristic limits) as an “eminently republican element in government,” one that “places the real direction of Society in the hands of the governed.” Drawing on venerable precedents (including Magna Carta’s famous promise that “no free man shall be taken or imprisoned […] except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land”), from time to time the Supreme Court has recalled the idea that juries exist in order to “prevent oppression by the Government.”[15] As Supreme Court justice Byron White still recognised in 1975 (in Taylor v. Louisiana), “the purpose of a jury is to guard against the exercise of arbitrary power — to make available the commonsense judgment of the community as a hedge against the overzealous or mistaken prosecutor and in preference to the professional or perhaps overconditioned or biased response of a judge.”

Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, predictable establishment arguments against giving ordinary people the power to enforce or suspend laws they opposed began to win out. When elite figures like Jefferson or Hamilton affirmed “trial by jury as the only anchor” that might hold a government to “the principles of its constitution,” they did so in a context in which respectable gentlemen could assume that a jury of their peers would indeed be restricted to their peers, i.e. to other men of property and good sense. (Depending on how you date such things, women only became fully and equally eligible to serve on juries across the US in 1968 or 1975, and [after some token and uneven steps in the 1920s] in or after 1968 in the UK; the last UK property qualifications on eligibility for jury service were only eliminated in 1974). Giving juries too much quasi-legislative authority after decades marked by more egalitarian-minded experiences like Reconstruction and the rise of Populism was, for established power, a much less welcome prospect.

Eventually a decisive U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Sparf v. U.S. (1895) effectively foreclosed the possibility of jury nullification, by reasserting the right of the court (rather than the jury) to determine the scope and application of the law per se. Yes, a jury may acquit, in principle, but they may now only do, ordinarily, according to criteria that are unilaterally set down by a judge. As SC Justice Harlan put it in Sparf, speaking for the majority view, by discouraging judges and lawyers from reminding a jury of their right to decide on both the facts of a case and the legitimacy of the statute that regulates it, i.e. by limiting a jury’s attention to the alleged facts alone, so then a court can be assured that decisions will be taken “not by a tribunal which makes its own law, but by a tribunal that obeys the law as made.” Since 1895, notes the useful Wikipedia entry on this decision, “judges do not inform juries of their power to nullify the case statute, although that power is universally acknowledged,” and as far as legal precedent goes “Sparf remains the last direct opinion of the Supreme Court on jury nullification.”

More recently, to cite Jordan Paul again, a series of “appeals court judges have ruled that a judge can prevent a defense attorney from even mentioning nullification to the jury; that judges have an affirmative duty to prevent nullification, and can remove potential jurors who indicate that they intend to nullify; that a judge can give instructions strongly hinting that juries don’t have the power to nullify; and even that a judge can tell a juror who asks about their nullification powers” that such powers do not really exist. In 1988, a court of appeal upheld what the judge had directly told the jury in the case U.S. vs. Krzyske earlier that year: “there is no such thing as valid jury nullification.” In one remarkable 1996 case about drug possession, one member of the jury (Laura Kriho) boldly reminded her eleven peers that “they could acquit for any reason, including the unduly harsh sentence that would follow a conviction. One of the other jurors wrote a note to the judge informing on Kriho, and the latter was subsequently charged with and convicted of contempt of court for her actions, for intentionally serving on a jury with the intent to obstruct justice.” In 2018 the prevailing restrictions on any exercise of jury nullification were summarised and confirmed in the punitive Supreme Court ruling Kleinman v. United States.[16]

As things stand, in today’s United States “most judges will prohibit attorneys from using their closing arguments to directly appeal to jurors to nullify the law.” Today, concludes Jordan Paul, regardless of any oaths of impartiality, many if not most judges effectively “act as a second prosecutor, putting their thumbs on the proverbial scales of justice by all but preventing jurors from considering the possibility of nullification. It is one more example of how courts at every level protect the interests of the wealthy, the powerful, and the state at the expense of everyone else.” As things stand, it’s hard to argue with Paddy Friend when he emphasises the essential ambiguity of a practice whose normal use is clearly that of an institutional safety valve, a mechanism ordinarily intended to maintain and preserve a system of domination — but whose occasionally exceptional use might nevertheless threaten such a system profoundly. “It seems likely that jury nullification is only permitted,” Friend concludes, “insofar as it remains a contingent rejection of law; were nullification to become generalised, or articulated for as part of an explicitly abolitionist project, I have little doubt that the state and legal apparatus would quickly intervene to abolish the practice altogether.”[17] (And as Paddy Friend and his DOJ co-defendants like Tim Crosland know rather better than most, this is exactly what the current British government is currently trying to do).

At the same time, and crucially, don’t forget that the possibility of nullification still stubbornly exists, and must exist as long as genuine juries exist. Today’s judges and governments certainly don’t want a jury to exercise its power to nullify, but so long as the authority, autonomy and secrecy of jury deliberations remain protected, no judge or politician can overrule them. Every time twelve ordinary people gather to speak the truth (or issue a “verdict”) about a case, they are invested with at least the potential to speak truth to power as well. Any set of jurors may always choose to disregard the way a judge might instruct them, in favour of their own deliberative intuition of what is fair and just. In this way, the routine practice of jury trials still harbours a legally sanctioned (albeit heavily discouraged) potential for popular defiance. Whenever a jury gathers, a group of ordinary people are at least equipped with the potential directly to defy those who normally lay down the law, and who ordinarily do so precisely from a position of social superiority and height. The only fully reliable way to control juries would be to eliminate them altogether.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that establishment-minded thinkers and judges typically regard jury nullification with the greatest suspicion, as opening the door to little more than mob rule. In prevailing legal practice, the bare possibility of nullification remains just that. Needless to say, it’s especially difficult for jurors to act on their quasi-”legislative” potential if they aren’t able to hear the full testimony of the defendants they are called to judge. In practice, in today’s legal climate accused activists are banned from speaking their minds, whereas deliberating juries are required to make up their own minds after hearing only a small portion of the pertinent evidence.

As things stand, consequently, thanks to the precedent set by Rosenberg’s conviction in October 2025, the perfectly legal (and indefensibly cruel) practices of animal exploitation and slaughter on an industrial scale are now authorised to continue in California on a secure footing, backed by the full resources of the state, insured against any possible disruption by anarchic “extremists.”[18]

VI

Whatever the immediate issue might be, whether it’s a matter of animal or human rights, of climate change, of nuclear weapons, of imperial aggression, it’s hard to exaggerate the significance of the most basic question at stake here: what is the legal status of an actor’s motive and intention? The answer is literally fundamental to the whole common law tradition that frames judicial proceedings in the UK and the UK. What many if not most of us who live according to the laws of this tradition may not yet understand, however, is that there isn’t actually a clear legal or constitutional answer to this all-important question. The answer remains irreducibly political and moral, and so it varies with the political and moral forces contesting it. And while this clearly isn’t the place to consider the more philosophical dimensions of this point any further, even a little reflection on what might count as “an intention” is enough to show how difficult or rather how impossible it is to separate an “immediate” or surface-level intention from a more fundamentally motivating one, how artificial it is to seek to isolate one intention from another, or to try to sever means from ends.[19] Any judge needs to choose, basically, between either (a) allowing the irreducibly political and thus complex and relational question of motivating intentions into their courtroom, or (b) excluding it by restricting discussion to the mere “facts of the case” and the “letter of the law.”

Either way, everyone knows that arguments about apparent motive or intention remain a crucial aspect of any criminal trial. If the driver of a car kills a pedestrian in the street, they will only be convicted of first-degree murder if the prosecution can persuade a jury, beyond reasonable doubt, that this death was indeed the result of a premeditated plan. The prosecution needs to show it was clearly deliberate, rather than a tragic accident or a case of drunk driving. Same goes for any act of assault, for a charge of ‘grievous bodily harm with intent,’ or indeed for a state crime like genocide. Demonstrable intent is the key issue in each case, as indicated by what a perpetrator might say or suggest, and as confirmed by a clear sequence of motivated actions.[20]

As any overview of criminal law will confirm, the basic common law test of liability is still encapsulated by the old Latin phrase actus reus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea: “the act is not culpable unless the mind is guilty.” Elementary British and American legal writing confirms this basic point over and over. “Mens rea is generally an essential element of any criminal offense,” according to the standard US legal encyclopaedia, “and some indication of congressional intent, express or implied, is required to dispense with mens rea as an element of a crime. A crime ordinarily is not committed if the mind of the person doing the act is innocent” (21 Am. Jur. 2d Criminal Law §112).[21] “The mental state element that is part of the definition of most criminal offenses”, reiterates a representative survey of the issue, “is crucial to culpability and central to our value as moral beings.”[22] As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. quipped, in his 1881 book The Common Law, “even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.”

If its interpretation of a case is to prevail, then, what the prosecution needs to establish above all is a convincing account of this mens rea, this allegedly “guilty mind.” As a useful online summary puts it, “for the vast majority of offences, mens rea will be satisfied if the defendant can be shown to have intended their actions.”[23] Someone will be found guilty of burglary in the UK, for instance, if the prosecution can prove that they entered “a building as a trespasser, with intent to steal anything in the building, inflict grievous bodily harm on any person within the building or commit unlawful damage to the building or anything within it.” (Though this again isn’t the place to consider the point any further, it’s already striking that the most basic or generic term for the mental or deliberate dimension of a crime is precisely this old phrase mens rea i.e. guilty mind, rather than a more neutral term like “state of mind”; when the mind per se enters an English court, so to speak, in a sense it does so in a way that’s presumed to be guilty in advance).

Motive and intention are always central concerns, then, for any prosecution. The more controversial question is: what about the defence? May someone accused of a crime try to persuade a jury to exonerate them, by explaining not just the immediate “intention” but the deeper reasons for their actions? May they discuss why they not only intended to break into a poultry farm or a factory, e.g. by cutting or knocking down a fence — but also why they resolved to do such a thing in the first place? May they discuss their intention not only in the most narrowly construed sense of the word, but also in its more important and expansive sense? May they explain, in short, why they really did what they did?

As the critical legal scholar Alan Norrie observes, “here we should note an interesting fact about mens rea. While it claims to be based upon individual justice through the operation of a fault requirement, it completely ignores a normal mental element in human conduct in its attribution of fault. It is as firmly established in legal doctrine as any rule can be that motive is irrelevant to responsibility […, so] one of the law’s core concepts, perhaps the core concept, [thus] remains obscure and mystifying.”[24] One of the main reasons for this mystification, Norrie goes on to show, results from a prolonged class effort, itself thoroughly motivated and spanning the whole history of English common law, to “desocialise” and thus de-politicise human agency. Though this isn’t the place for a more detailed discussion, Norrie’s summary of this complex history is well worth citing at some length:

The attitude that motive is irrelevant to responsibility and the guilty mind has deep roots within the common law tradition, and is linked to the social conflicts of the period in which the law was developed. […] The ruling classes sought a universal definition of right and wrong that could legitimate extremely dubious processes of property expropriation of the poor by the rich. It was the political success of these classes in forcing their will upon the lower classes that ensured that the legal reformers could express the rules of a legal system which were the product of sharp social conflicts in terms of consensus and good common sense. The rule of private property became the ‘rule of law’, so that attacks on the former could be condemned as attacks on a universal social good. […]

Desperate social need and indignant claim of right were the motives of the poor in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These were hardly motives calculated to win favour or compassion from a social class determined to impose a property order on all regardless of the consequences. Small wonder then that motive’s relevance to guilt was very firmly squashed, and doing justice to individuals became a matter of ‘childish’ moral judgment. The law’s subjective recognition of individual fault has this fundamental limitation imposed from the very beginning. […] Separating motive from intention, and focusing on the latter, the law was able to focus on the question of ‘how’ acts came to be committed, and to exclude the question ‘why’ they were done.[25]

What about the people tasked with listening to both the prosecution and the defence? Can a jury make up their mind up about guilt or innocence, can they arrive at a judgement beyond reasonable doubt, if they are prevented from hearing the full truth that might be pertinent to the accusation? Such full truth needn’t imply a comprehensive inventory of everything that could be mentioned about this or that case, since many things are clearly not pertinent to a specific charge (e.g. irrelevant details about previous convictions or a person’s private life, unfounded hearsay, etc.) — but as a matter of general principle, should a defendant’s own understanding of their purpose and motives be included as part of the evidence a jury is instructed to assess? As the Filton activists’ lead defence barrister Rajiv Menon asked the jury at the end of their first trial, in January, “how can you assess the defendants’ characters, their credibility, their conduct at Filton or their states of mind at critical times in the chronology that ended in that action, if you ignore the wider context of what has been happening in Gaza and the impact that those events have had on these defendants? Are you supposed to forget your pasts, your own knowledge of the world, your values, your sense of what is right and wrong and fair and reasonable, when you consider the evidence in this case? Of course not. That would be ridiculous.”

In short: if an indignant jury recalls their residual right to suspend or nullify enforcement of a law they find unconscionable — perhaps now in direct defiance of the judge who instructs them — can they include reference to such purpose or motives as they gather to deliberate and make their decision?

This crucial question has received very different answers in different times and places, and so far it has been the central and most far-reaching question at stake in the ongoing multi-stage trial of the Filton 25. It’s already clear that this momentous trial is making legal and political history in the UK, and its consequences may reverberate for years to come. Before moving on to consider the case itself, however, we still have to say a little more about how the judicial system itself normally frames discussion of a defendant’s motives.

VII

Imagine your children are starving to death, and in your desperate need to feed them you steal a loaf of bread. Once apprehended and put on trial, can you or your lawyer ask a jury to consider your circumstances, and thus the context and motives of your action? Or will the judge instruct the jurors to consider only the evidence that might allow them to settle a single question: did you, or did you not, steal the bread? A tradition of natural law with deep roots in European philosophy offered an immediate answer to this question, when it affirmed anyone’s unconditional right to life i.e. survival; even so ferocious and absolute an advocate for submission to established law as Thomas Hobbes was willing to grant, for this reason, in extremis, any person’s right to take whatever actions their own immediate survival might require. The mainstream current of English legal opinion, however, has preferred to run in a rather different direction.

One canonical answer to this question, in the English legal tradition, was given back in the 1670s by the early modern jurist Sir Matthew Hale, in the notes that were posthumously published as his Pleas of the Crown. Hale accepted that “it is the conscience of the jury that must pronounce the prisoner guilty or not guilty,”[26] but he also countered suggestions made by some his contemporaries, for instance natural law theorists like Grotius and Pufendorf, that in a case of extreme necessity it might be legitimate to steal food. If such an appeal to dire necessity could be made at all, Hale argued, even in dire circumstances, then this would imply that “theft is no theft, or at least not punishable as theft.” Hale objected, in short, that to allow the question of an actor’s motives or purpose to enter into the judgement of a crime was tantamount to inviting individuals to take the law into their own hands. If someone was free to explain why they broke any particular law then it might effectively authorise them to decide which laws they wanted to obey, and which to disobey. Anticipating an argument that has been repeated with remarkable consistency ever since, Hale basically said that to allow discussion of motives in such cases would be a recipe for anarchism. In keeping with the priorities of those propertied classes who actually established the bulk of what passes for English common law, Hale insisted that theft must always and everywhere be treated as theft, no ifs or buts. However it came to be acquired or inherited, legally titled property must be treated as sacrosanct by definition, regardless of context. “By the laws of England,” Hale concludes, anyone who steals anything, for any reason, is guilty in one and the same way: “if a person, being under necessity for want of victuals or clothes, shall upon that account clandestinely and animo furandi steal another man’s goods, it is felony, and a crime by the laws of England punishable with death.”[27]

Several friends of mine who went to law school, some years back, on both sides of the Atlantic, recall how they and some of their peers were rather shocked to learn, in their introductory classes on criminal law, that this position was in fact the prevailing norm of our legal systems, rather than a perverse exception. (It may also be fair to add that, if you are a law student or early-career lawyer, you shouldn’t look forward to an eminent career in this field unless you are prepared to get over such shock pretty quickly).

It’s quite telling, furthermore, that the actually-precedent-setting case that has long guided common law judicial thinking in the UK on this point didn’t involve something as banal and as understandable as stealing a loaf of bread, but instead something a bit more dramatic and extra-ordinary — a case of murder and cannibalism on the high seas. Here is Wikipedia’s nicely distilled summary of what happened:

In 1884, the four-man crew of the wrecked yacht Mignonette were cast adrift in a small lifeboat without provisions. After nearly three weeks at sea, and with little hope of rescue, two of the crew, Tom Dudley and Edwin Stephens, decided that in order to save their own lives they would need to kill and eat the ship’s 17-year-old cabin boy Richard Parker, who by that time had fallen seriously ill after drinking seawater. The defendants were found guilty and were sentenced to the statutory death penalty, though with a recommendation of mercy. They were released soon after the conviction.

In the landmark case Regina v. Dudley & Stephens (1884), the court expressed some sympathy for the two defendants but rejected their forlorn appeal to necessity, arguing that it was immoral and lacked legal precedent. This case is still often cited to illustrate the principle that a serious crime like homicide cannot be “justified by necessity unless it is committed in self-defense.”[28] (Parenthetically, you might think that there is something a little fishy going on here, that the principle which should inform something so basic and fundamental and “normal” as an appeal to necessity might be established through reference to such an extreme and exceptional case, especially for a country whose “law of the land” is indeed so fundamentally about purportedly lawful ownership of land — and you would be right, very much so, but this isn’t the place to pursue the point).

The precedent set by rulings like the 1884 Dudley case means, to this day, that it’s up to a judge to decide whether a defendant might be given leave to explain why they thought their actions were necessary, or not. More often than not, judges tend to follow in Hale’s footsteps, and are liable to instruct a jury to consider only the narrow “facts” of a case. Intentions are so murky and difficult to verify, after all; by contrast surely facts are facts, end of story. Did the accused actually take possession of a chicken or break into a factory, yes or no? Did these peace activists destroy these munitions, yes or no? Ordinarily, unless a defendant can show that they themselves were in immediate and serious danger, and had no viable alternatives, a judge won’t allow them to tell a jury why they thought they were doing the right thing. Ordinarily, in short, a defendant cannot refer to their motives as part of their defence. Another useful encyclopaedia entry illustrates the point in the terms we’re now familiar with:

If a person breaks into a laboratory used for the testing of pharmaceuticals on animals, the question of guilt is determined by the presence of an actus reus, i.e. entry without consent and damage to property, and a mens rea, i.e. intention to enter and cause the damage. That the person might have had a clearly articulated political motive to protest such testing does not affect liability. If motive has any relevance, this may be addressed in the sentencing part of the trial, when the court considers what punishment, if any, is appropriate.

Such is the prevailing law of the land. But what if the accused acted in order to prevent the most grievous of all possible crimes in all possible lands, a crime so serious that it is treated, internationally, as a crime against humanity itself? What if their goal was to put an end to the crime that is most profoundly and rightly associated with the imperative of “never again”, the crime that countries like the UK and the US, and all other signatories to the Genocide Convention of 1948, are solemnly obliged “to prevent and punish.” What if they acted to stop an ongoing genocide? What then? These questions bring us back, finally, to the Filton trial.

VIII

As summarised at the top of this essay, the basic facts of the Filton case are already well known and don’t need to be repeated again here. To anyone who’s prepared to listen to them, the Filton activists have always given perfectly clear reasons for why they broke into Elbit’s factory during the night of 5-6 August 2024. As the Filton25 prisoner and hunger striker Kamran Ahmed explained, when he was finally released on bail from Pentonville prison on 19 February 2026, “we just wanted to save lives — that says it all, as well as any blanket statement could.”

One of the Filton activists who was arrested on the scene, Zoe Rogers, discussed their motives in a poem that deserves to be cited on every available occasion. “When they ask why I did it,” she wrote a few weeks after she was arrested that August, “I tell them about the children,” the children whose “childhood was stolen from them,” whose “bodies are crushed so easily by falling buildings. […] I tell them about the mother who received the ‘approximate weight’ of body parts of her family to bury, as they had been shattered beyond recognition. I tell them about the history”, and how it was the UK that started it, with our Balfour Declaration. “I say I cannot stand for this anymore, that it can go on no longer, so I took action against Elbit, their weapons supplier. But I never forget to say: it was love, not hate, that called me. I watched their songs and dances for freedom. I read their hope-filled books. I listened to their dreams of becoming doctors, teachers, journalists, and of never giving up.”

Having seen so much death, they acted in order to save lives. They acted on the rather elementary presumption that, as Jordan Devlin put it after the premiere of the film Operation Recomply (in London on 31 May 2026), “Palestinians deserve to live.” They recognised an emergency when they saw one, and responded to it as such. Speaking alongside Jordan after the film on 31 May, Zoe emphasised the simplicity of her reasons. Having learned about what Israeli soldiers were doing in Gaza, “I knew it was something I had to do, I didn’t feel I had any choice.”

More specifically, they say they smashed a few of Elbit’s quadcopters in order to prevent them from being used to kill more people in Gaza. As the Filton campaign’s website explains, these “quadcopters are used for bombings but are also known as sniper-drones, which are activated after bombings to annihilate remaining survivors by detecting living pulses. Similarly, quadcopters have been used to play recordings which mimic the sounds of crying children after an attack, to lure out survivors and then kill them.” Testimony about the way these drones are deployed in Gaza has been provided and corroborated by a wide range of sources, including by the retired NHS surgeon Professor Nizam Mamode. In November 2024, Mamode gave Parliament a detailed and altogether harrowing account of what he heard and saw after volunteering at an overwhelmed and undersupplied hospital in Gaza:

A bomb would drop, maybe on a crowded, tented area. And then the drones would come down […]. So, the drones would come down and pick off civilians, children. And we had description after description. This is not an occasional thing. This was day after day after day operating on children who would say, “I was lying on the ground after a bomb dropped and this quadcopter came down and hovered over me and shot me.”

To anyone who is willing and able to listen, in short, the Filton activists say loud and clear that they raided Elbit’s factory in order to eliminate at least a few of the weapons that Israel and its allies have been using in their illegal war on Palestine.

The decisive legal question is, as ever — who is actually prepared and indeed able to listen to them? Once they were taken to court to answer for what they had done, were the Filton activists allowed to explain themselves?

At a recent meeting held to rally support for the Filton defendants, one of its organisers drew on a familiar illustration of a necessity defence to explain what’s basically at stake. Imagine you’re walking down a street, and you notice that up ahead a house is on fire. You hurry over to it and see that the top floors are already engulfed in flames, beyond any chance of rescue; to your horror you also see that a child is trapped in the ground floor’s front room. Without hesitation you break down the front door in order save the child.

As with the drowning neighbour emergency, this is indeed the sort of situation in which a necessity defence most easily applies. Yes, by knocking down the door you committed the offence of criminal damage, but the danger was immediate, there was no alternative, and the imminent harm to avoid was obviously much greater than the damage caused.

Tweak the scenario a little bit though, and consider this variation on the metaphor. What if the burning house isn’t on your street, but is rather located thousands of miles away, in a place like East Timor or Palestine? What if it’s not just an isolated house, but one of a great many burning houses, in what used to be a crowded town or refugee camp? What if there isn’t just one child to rescue, but many thousands of them? And what if these fires weren’t caused by a random accident but are instead the carefully perpetrated result of a deliberate genocidal assault, undertaken by one of the most lethal military machines on earth? What if, finally, some of the munitions that lit these fires and targeted these children were manufactured right here in the UK, and then transferred and used in ways that demonstrably involve the active collusion of our own government?

As Filton defendant Jordan Devlin put it in a recent public discussion (at Genesis Cinema in London on 31 May), the ongoing genocide in Gaza is clearly an emergency that calls for urgent and appropriate action. If a house is on fire, you don’t walk round the block and ponder how best to act: you respond as the situation demands, as full and as immediately as you can.

Anyone who breaks into a house to directly save a helpless child in Britain can be pretty confident that, if prosecuted for their action, they are likely to find a sympathetic hearing from most judges and surely from any jury. But what if the house is located on the other side of the world and is burning partly because our government helped one of its allies to bomb it? What then?

IX

I mention the embattled territory of East Timor because this abstract question received an especially clear answer in a landmark case that went to trial in Liverpool in 1996, and brief reference to this earlier ‘Seeds of Hope’ or ‘Ploughshares Four’ action should shed some comparative light on what is so remarkable and so disturbing about the ongoing Filton trials.

Back in the mid 1990s, the notoriously authoritarian government of Indonesia was still waging its long and ugly war against the relatively defenceless population of East Timor. The UK was one of the countries that supplied Indonesia’s army and air force with the equipment it needed to wage this war. Among other arms manufacturers, the company British Aerospace (now BAE) was contracted to provide warplanes to Indonesia, as part of a £500 million weapons deal agreed in 1993.

In January 1996, Andrea Needham and two other peace activists broke into a British Aerospace hanger and smashed up one of the Hawk warplanes that had been approved for export to Indonesia. After publicly confirming their presence in the hangar via contacts in the Press Agency, Needham and her comrades were eventually arrested at the scene and charged (along with a fourth activist, Angie Zelter, who was arrested a few days later) with causing criminal damage. After being held in prison on remand for six months, in July 1996 the four defendants were “acquitted after a jury at Liverpool Crown Court determined that disabling a warplane in the UK to prevent it from being used by the Indonesian military in East Timor constituted ‘reasonable force in the prevention of a crime’.” Having been vindicated by the jury, the four activists explained, in a letter published on 6 August in no less a venue than the Daily Express, that during their trial they had been able to argue that they hadn’t broken the law but upheld it.

We presented a legal defence — that of using reasonable force to prevent crime. The judge allowed this defence to be put to the jury and the jury, having studied the evidence, accepted it. We were acquitted. The jury found that the action we took to prevent the Hawk killing people in East Timor was justified in law. The law is [indeed] being broken, but not by us. The law against genocide is being broken by British Aerospace in selling Hawks to Indonesia’s brutal dictatorship. We have been held accountable by the courts for our actions, but British Aerospace and the British Government are flouting the law with impunity. We took full responsibility for our actions, but British aerospace and the Government are ignoring their responsibilities by selling weapons which they know will be used to kill civilians in an illegally occupied country.

Why were Andrea Needham and her co-defendants acquitted, if they were demonstrably “guilty” of criminal damage? Twenty years after the event, in 2016, Needham published a book-length answer to this question, but the short version is just what you might expect: they were acquitted because, despite a demonstrably unsympathetic judge, they were indeed allowed to explain to their jury, in all necessary detail, why they had damaged the Hawk warplane. They were allowed to explain that, before setting off to BA’s hanger with hammers in hand, they had first engaged in a wide range of other campaigning efforts, including lobbying their MPs. They were allowed to call on a range of expert witnesses who could testify both to the scale and ferocity of Indonesia’s assault on East Timor, and to the actual role played by British-supplied munitions. They were also even allowed to call on witnesses from East Timor itself, who provided detailed first-hand accounts of atrocities committed by Indonesian troops.[29]

In an interview she gave in 2016 to explain precisely “why I was acquitted,” Andrea Needham distilled the apparent reasons for the jury’s decision. It’s true, she admitted, that initially the jury seemed baffled that these women could both admit that they had damaged the plane and yet also plead not guilty to the charge of criminal damage. It’s worth quoting her account at some length:

The jury, probably most of them didn’t know anything about East Timor before they came into that courtroom, and I think that for the first few days they were quite puzzled: ‘The women have admitted this thing, but they’re pleading not guilty. What’s that about?’ […]

We said we had done the damage, but in English law you are allowed to use ‘reasonable force’ to prevent crime, that’s the Criminal Law Act 1967. We said what we were doing was reasonable force to prevent the crime of genocide in East Timor, and it was reasonable because we and hundreds of other people had done everything else in our power previous to the action to stop the sale of the Hawks to Indonesia. We’d marched and demonstrated and petitioned and done direct action and written to our MPs and everything else we could think of, and nothing had worked. And the planes were about to be delivered to Indonesia. Once they were delivered, there would be nothing further we could do to stop them being used to commit genocide in East Timor.

So we said that doing what we did was reasonable in the circumstances. The jury, having heard all the evidence about East Timor, and the Hawks, and what the Hawks were doing in East Timor, and about all the things we had done to try and stop it previously, found that that was reasonable.

So we were acquitted.

In particular, Needham explained, they were acquitted because they were given a chance to talk to the jury directly about their basic moral principles and political purpose. These principles themselves are as simple as can be. “It’s not a sort of complicated legal thing at all. Because the trial was in Liverpool, and Liverpool was very badly bombed in the Second World War, we used an analogy. We said: ‘If somebody in Germany had felt that they didn’t want those planes to bomb civilians in Liverpool, would you think it was a criminal act for that person in Germany to go and nonviolently disarm a plane? That’s what we were doing.’ When you put it like that, it’s perfectly clear.”

It seems that for enough randomly chosen people in Liverpool in 1996, whether a house is bombed next to yours, or some miles away from yours, isn’t a very important difference — at least not compared to the question of who is bombing it and why.

The Ploughshares jury decided to acquit in 1996, Needham adds, despite the fact that the judge himself thought the defendants had no case, and was apparently confident that any sensible jury would reach the same conclusion.

It was just outrageous, as far as he was concerned, people breaking in and smashing up somebody else’s property, then bringing in some half-arsed defence about trying to prevent crime. And I think he felt quite personally affronted by that. But at the same time, because it was a high-profile case, possibly we could have appealed if he’d refused us permission to use that defence. And, as far as he was concerned, it was such a ludicrous thing that we were trying to say that there was no way any right-minded jury would accept that defence anyway, so he might as well let us have our day in court and we’d have nothing to complain about when we were convicted. He seemed very angry at the moment when the verdicts were announced. He dashed out of the courtroom and that was the end of it.[30]

Back when the Seeds of Hope activists were on trial in the late 1990s, one person who most definitely did think the defendants had a compelling case was a young human rights lawyer called Keir Starmer. In 1998, this Keir Starmer represented Andrea Needham herself when a case brought against her for participating in anti-war campaigning in 1994 was taken to the European Court of Human Rights. Thirty years later, in early July 2025, just before now-prime-minister Keir Starmer’s government proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, Needham remembered how, back in the late 1990s, this same man had argued that she and her co-defendants should be acquitted because their disruptive actions had been intended to prevent much greater evils. “When he represented us at Strasbourg,” Needham recalled, “he seemed to be very passionate about it. In retrospect, I suspect he was just doing his job because the way that he acts now makes me feel that he really has no moral compass whatsoever.”

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, moreover, the Seeds of Hope case wasn’t an isolated incident.[31] A 2001 Guardian survey of recent “perverse” jury verdicts begins by describing how, in January of that year, two anti-nuclear protesters were acquitted after breaking into the Barrow-in-Furness shipyard in order to damage one of Britain’s nuclear submarines with an axe. The two protestors “happily admitted their intention to trash the sub but said they were doing so because nuclear weapons were immoral and illegal. The judge told the jury that such ideals formed no defence against the charge. He was ignored. Not guilty, said the jury.” A similarly “perverse” exercise of jury independence had also led to the acquittal of the whistleblower Clive Ponting in 1985. Ponting was a senior Ministry of Defence official who was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act after he exposed government lies about how the Argentine warship General Belgrano was sunk during the Falklands War. “There was no doubt that he had done so,” noted the Guardian, “and that he had no legal defence to the charge, as the trial judge made clear to the jury. Nevertheless, the jury acquitted him.” Other notable cases included the 1990 acquittal of Pat Pottle and Michael Randle, accused of helping the Soviet spy George Blake escape from a London prison back in 1963, and the acquittal of 28 Greenpeace activists, in 2000, who argued that they had been right to destroy a field of genetically modified maize in Norfolk in order to prevent the contamination of neighbouring crops.

A few years later, in March 2003, to protest the onset of the second US-led invasion of Iraq, Margaret Jones and several other peace activists broke into the Fairford Royal Air Force base in order to damage aircraft and other military equipment. The subsequent judgement of the court of appeal in the case of the Fairford Five, R v Jones, held in February 2006, became famous, among other things, for remarks made by one of the five judges, Lord Hoffman. Hoffman reminded the court that “civil disobedience on conscientious grounds has a long and honourable history in this country. People who break the law to affirm their belief in the injustice of a law or government action are sometimes vindicated by history. The suffragettes are an example which comes immediately to mind. It is the mark of a civilised community that it can accommodate protests and demonstrations of this kind.”

X

Back at the beginning of our century, anyone who wanted to defend the right of a jury to make up its own collective mind about such cases could still openly appeal to uncontroversial principles and precedents in English law. Eighty years ago, in 1956, the prominent judge and legal philosopher Patrick Devlin could still defend trial by jury as “an insurance that the criminal law will conform to the ordinary man’s idea of what is fair and just. If it does not, the jury will not be a party to its enforcement. They have in the past used their power of acquittal to defeat the full operation of laws which they thought too hard. […] I know of no other real checks that exist to-day upon the power of the executive.”[32] As anyone can see, this basic idea that the laws of the realm should indeed conform to what ordinary people consider fair and just isn’t far removed from once-revolutionary affirmations of popular sovereignty, for example the claims advanced by the great popular revolt of 1381 (whose leaders resolved “to have no laws of England, only which they themselves had moved to be ordained“) or by the Levellers of the 1640s (for whom “every man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that Government”).

The most famous and influential precedent of all goes right back to the decades that followed the English Revolution, back to the era of Sir Matthew Hale himself, and was set by the most landmarking of all landmark cases: the Bushel case of 1670. In that year two Quakers, William Penn and William Meade, were prosecuted for preaching to an unlawfully large assembly. They were accused of doing this at a time when, in the wake of the English civil wars, more than five people could only gather for a religious reason on premises controlled by the established and thoroughly regulated Church of England. Nobody has described the significance of this case better than the barrister Rajiv Menon KC, in the closing speech he gave at the first Filton trial in January 2026, and for reasons that will become clear in a moment his words deserve to be quoted at length:

William Penn and William Meade had preached to a group of more than five people on the streets of London. They stood trial at the Old Bailey before a judge and jury, and at the end of the evidence, the judge directed the jury to convict, but the jury refused to convict. The judge was furious, and again ordered the jury to convict, stating that they would not be dismissed until they did so. The jury again refused to convict. The judge remanded the entire jury in custody for two days and ordered that they be denied all food and water. […] When the jury returned to court two days later, having not had any food or water for that period, the judge again ordered them to convict. The jury continued to refuse and returned a verdict of not guilty.

The judge fined the jury for contempt of court and remanded them in custody until the fines were paid. Eight jurors paid their fines, but four refused, and one of those was Edward Bushel, who then petitioned a higher court for what is called a writ of habeas corpus, which, if issued by the court, would result in his immediate release from custody. The higher court issued that writ, and Edward Bushel and the three others were released, establishing the right of a jury to return a verdict without fear of punishment from the trial judge.

This legal challenge by Edward Bushel has come to be known as Bushel’s case and is one of the most celebrated cases in British legal history. There’s a marble plaque inside the Old Bailey in central London, which reads as follows: ‘[…] This tablet commemorates the courage and endurance of the jury, Thomas Veer, Edward Bushel, and 10 others who refused to give a verdict against them, although locked up without food for two nights and were fined for their final verdict of not guilty. The case of these jurymen was reviewed on a writ of habeas corpus, and Chief Justice Vaughan delivered the opinion of the court, which established the right of juries to give their verdict according to their convictions.’”

The right or power that was established by the Bushel case in 1670 came to be known as the principle of “jury equity” — the right of a jury to acquit or convict according to their conscience or convictions, and thus their right also to have access to all the pertinent aspects of the case they are called to judge. The old word verdict itself connotes what it is at stake; anyone who remembers a bit of Latin can see that it’s made up of syllables that evoke verity and diction, or truth and speech. To give a verdict is literally to speak the truth about a case. A jury can only do this, truthfully, if they remain free to consider and assess all the pertinent aspects of that case.

There’s no space here of course for anything like a systematic history of how the principle of jury equity has or hasn’t been applied in British courts over the last several decades, but suffice it to say that in the late 2010s and early 2020s the prevailing trend — as anticipated by people like Andrea Needham in 2016 — was again moving, overall, in favour of people accused of taking direct action to prevent things like catastrophic climate change or crimes against humanity. Through to early 2023, protestors who were principled and heroic enough to take direct or disruptive action to draw attention to climate change or grievous injustice could point to what must have looked like a relatively clear and reliable pattern. If environmental or peace activists were given a real chance to explain their actions to a jury, then again and again the jury tended to acquit them of any wrong-doing; failing that, the court of appeal might still be relied upon to countermand “manifestly excessive” sentences (as when, for instance, the prison terms of twelve to sixteen months initially imposed on three anti-fracking protestors were quashed in October 2018). “In April 2021,” notes DOJ’s Tim Crosland,

the Shell six, who had spray painted “Shell Lies” on Shell headquarters, were acquitted by a jury. In January 2022, the Colston four, who toppled the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston into Bristol harbour, were acquitted by a jury. In November 2022, members of Palestine Action, who had defaced Elbit Systems—suppliers of drones to the Israel Defence Forces—were acquitted by a jury. In January 2023, members of Insulate Britain were acquitted by a jury for blocking roads. It goes on…[33]

And indeed so it went on — until the UK government and the various corporate and imperial interests it represents decided that enough was enough. The pressure generated by groups like Extinction Rebellion and other kinds of forceful mass protest might have extracted significant concessions (not least an apparent commitment to net zero) from both government and corporations in the years that preceded the Covid pandemic, but it isn’t hard to see that any concessions which might contradict the demands of “business as usual” are likely to be undermined or revoked as soon as a few well-positioned players decide that the time is right.

Such decisions, by definition, are taken behind closed doors, but in this case it’s easy to pick out one of the key moments when the consequences of this decision were made public for everyone to see. This is the moment when, in March 2023, the retired social worker Trudi Warner made history by reminding a London jury that, as they considered the case against a group of Insulate Britain campaigners, they still retained the right to make up their own minds. A longstanding climate activist, Warner had been listening to the case in the public gallery, and was struck by the remarkably severe restrictions that the judge Silas Reid was imposing on the defence. “We are currently seeing the courts complicit in injustice themselves,” she later explained, “by refusing to allow protesters to explain their motives to juries, thereby denying them a fair trial.” Judge Reid not only denied the Insulate Britain campaigners’ permission to make a necessity defence, he also even forbade them to use words like climate crisis or fuel poverty in his court. Three Insulate Britain activists, David Nixon, Amy Pritchard and Giovanna Lewis had refused to comply with such restrictions, and they were duly jailed (as a Guardian summary explains)

after addressing the juries at separate trials to explain their motivation for taking direct action. […] David Nixon, a care worker from Barnsley, was jailed for eight weeks for contempt of court after trying to explain to the jury at his trial the connection between insulation and tackling the climate crisis. Before being stopped by the judge, he said: “You’ve not been able to hear these truths because this court has not allowed me to say them.” Nixon said later in court he had found the inability to explain to the jury why he had taken direct action “soul-destroying.”

One of the defendants’ barristers, Tom Wainwright (a colleague of Rajiv Menon from Garden Court Chambers) drew attention to the key question: “The concerns raised about people’s ability to explain their motivations, and the consequences when they did, will, I think cause people to look again at this. A lot of protest cases all come down to the big question of where the boundary of freedom of expression lies.”

On 27 March 2023 Trudi Warner posed this big question in inescapable terms, by silently holding a placard outside the court, in order to act like “a human billboard.” What she wrote on her placard simply echoed the famous Bushel case plaque in the Old Bailey: “Jurors you have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to your conscience.”

Provoked by what he took to be a direct challenge to his authority, judge Silas Reid responded by immediately prosecuting Warner herself for contempt of court. On 28 March, Warner was handcuffed, arrested and locked up in the court’s custody unit. Within a week of her holding up a sign that had echoed one of its own most celebrated plaques, Warner found herself arraigned in the Old Bailey. A few months after that, the Tories’ Solicitor General (SG) sent her a 133-page indictment, and eventually, in April 2024, the case against her made its way to the High Court. By then the case against Warner had already turned into something of a cause célèbre. Immediately after the government decided to pursue her, more than twenty other people held similar placards outside inner London crown court, saying quite explicitly “If you prosecute Trudi, prosecute us too.” Before long twenty people became a hundred, then seven hundred, outside courts in London and all over the UK, all holding signs reminding jurors that they are free to acquit according to their conscience and that no judge can order them to convict. In the process, the remarkable civil rights group Defend Our Juries was created — again largely as a spontaneous reaction to flagrant injustice. As a DOJ spokesperson said at the time,

there was a group of judges, led by Judge Silas Reid, who were determined to conceal from juries the vital democratic principle of jury equity, i.e. their right to acquit irrespective of the ruling of the judge. From their point of view, Trudi Warner’s sign was a serious threat. But if Judge Reid’s insane decision to arrest Trudi Warner was an attempt to deter others from doing the same it has backfired spectacularly. Hundreds of people replicated her action outside every Crown Court across England and Wales.

Luckily for Trudi Warner and for what remains of jury trials in the UK, the High Court judge (Sir Pushpinder Saini) assigned to evaluate the Solicitor General’s case in April 2024 wasn’t at all impressed with it. “It is fanciful to suggest that Ms Warner’s behaviour falls into the category of contempt,” said Mr Justice Saini. “The category is limited to threatening, intimidatory, abusive conduct or other forms of harassment,” Saini argued, and the SG’s attempt to portray Warner’s actions in this light “significantly mischaracterise the evidence.”

Judge Saini’s ruling is also of great interest for the way it approaches, with characteristic discretion, the essential but forever troubling principle of jury equity, i.e. (again citing the old Bailey’s Bushel plaque) “the right of juries to give their verdict according to their convictions.” Judge Saini accepted that it is “probably best to describe jury equity as a principle of our law,” and reiterated that “this principle remains undisturbed and has been endorsed at the highest levels in this jurisdiction in recent times. As Lord Thomas held in R v Goncalves [2011] ‘a jury is entitled to acquit and its reasons for so doing are unknown. It is their right which cannot be questioned.’ It is a corollary of the principle endorsed by the House of Lords in R v Wang [2005] that a judge cannot direct a jury to convict a defendant.”[34]

Having affirmed this, however, Saini immediately added the following proviso. For all the irreducible importance of jury equity, Saini noted with approval that

counsel agreed that participants in the trial process cannot lawfully invite a jury to apply the principle of jury equity or indeed to inform them of it. That prohibition is how the common law squares the jury equity and the oath that jurors are required to swear [i.e. to give a true verdict according to the evidence]. I was referred to the description of how the tension operates in the United States in the judgment of Judge Leventhal of the United States’ Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit in US v Dougherty 473 F2d 113. Judge Leventhal describes how in the United States the existence of an ‘unreviewable and unreversible power in the jury to acquit in disregard of the instructions on the law given by the trial judge, has for many years co-existed with legal practice and precedent upholding instructions to the jury that they are required to follow the instructions of the court on all matters of law’ (at [1132]). This is also an accurate description of the position in our jurisdiction.

The prevailing judicial position, in short, in the UK as in the US, is that juries remain authorised in principle to exercise an essential right — so long as they are not told that they can exercise it. They are entitled to wield an “unreversible power” — so long as they are not actually encouraged to use it. Jury equity can still be honoured as what judge Saini calls, citing Professor John Spencer, a “valuable constitutional safeguard”[35] — so long as it never actually needs to be invoked.[36] (At the national or macro level a somewhat similar mixture of very silent acknowledgement and very active discouragement applies, for those reasons recalled by Locke, to the never-quite-eliminable power of the people to rebel and overthrow an illegitimate government).

Even judge Saini’s qualified affirmation of jury equity, however, was increasingly out of line with the consensus that was already taking shape in government and corporate circles in early 2024. Only a few weeks after Saini issued his detailed and suggestive ruling on Trudi Warner’s case on 18 April 2024, lawyers acting for the SG announced he would appeal against it. A few weeks after that, on 2 July, during the trial of Roger Hallam and four other members of Just Stop Oil, another judge (Mr Justice Hehir) had eleven people arrested and detained for holding signs similar to Warner’s outside Southwark Crown Court. Finally, following the superficial change in political personnel that resulted from the July 2024 general election, on 15 August a new Solicitor General (Sarah Sackman) decided to cut her department’s losses, and drop the case — though as would soon become clear, this decision reflected a change of means rather than of ends.

Trudi Warner may have won an historic victory at the High Court in the spring of 2024, but by itself this wasn’t remotely enough to stop the general direction of travel — against the rights of activists and protestors to explain their actions, and in favour of judicial restrictions upon their possible lines of defence. Though again this isn’t the place to chart this in proper detail, anyone who followed the course of government proceedings against peace or climate activists in and after 2023 can easily recognise an obvious pattern, as the arms and fossil fuel lobbies threw their full weight behind a coordinated government campaign designed to limit if not eliminate any consequential forms of political protest. In the spring and summer of 2024 perhaps the most spectacular single set of specific cases, which are already too familiar to discuss any further here, are those which led to the conviction of some 26 members of Just Stop Oil: in July 2024 Roger Hallam and several others received “the longest sentences ever given in the UK for non-violent protest” when they were each condemned to serve four or five years in jail, merely for planning, via a Zoom meeting, to obstruct traffic on a motorway.

Perhaps the clearest indication of this underlying shift in policies and priorities is provided by a substantial and influential report written in the first months of 2024 by an “independent” advisor on political violence, John Woodcock aka Lord Walney.[37] By early March, Lord Walney was calling for “a “zero-tolerance approach” to disruptive protest. “Militant groups like Palestine Action and Just Stop Oil,” Walney argued, “are using criminal tactics to create mayhem and hold the public and workers to ransom without fear of consequence. Banning terror groups has made it harder for their activists to plan crimes — that approach should be extended to extreme protest groups too.” In order to “protect our democracy from coercion” Walney’s report urged the police and Crown Prosecution Service to make fuller use of anti-terror legislation, and “to apply the law on encouraging terrorism broadly so any celebration of terrorist acts, or praise for terror groups and individuals, is viewed as a form of indirect encouragement” and prosecuted accordingly. Most notably for the question that concerns us here, after listing a series of trials in which members of Palestine Action had been acquitted by inappropriately sympathetic juries, Walney concluded that “it is essential for the upholding of the rule of law that trials of this nature are not politicised. The same is true of climate activism. Those who break the law as part of political protest must be met with the same response, no matter the cause on whose behalf they claim to be acting” (§3.162).

In May 2026, meanwhile, Trudi Warner’s earlier victory at the High Court still wouldn’t be enough to prevent the police from arresting her, once again, outside Woolwich Crown Court, along with a dozen others, for holding perfectly lawful placards saying “Jurors have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to their conscience” or “Jurors deserve to hear the whole truth.”

So long as this right is recognised, juries continue to pose an irreducible limit on government power. The only fully reliable way to control juries would be to eliminate the principle of jury equity altogether — and according to Defend Our Juries, this is exactly what our current government seems determined to do.

XI

Now you might think that the 1996 Seeds of Hope case set a clear precedent for the Palestine Action defendants in the Filton trials that began in November 2025. More immediate precedence, moreover, was established by the several cases in which Palestine Action members were themselves acquitted for taking direct action against Elbit Systems or associated companies. “The first Palestine Action case to come to court,” notes the Electronic Intifada’s Asa Winstanley,

ended in December 2021 with total defeat for Elbit. The ‘criminal damage’ case was effectively turned into a trial about Israeli war crimes. Three activists who had defaced the UAV Engines factory, an Elbit subsidiary in Shenstone near Birmingham in the English Midlands, were acquitted. Their lawyers successfully argued that while the three had indeed damaged the factory, it was not criminal damage, but rather proportionate action to prevent crimes in Palestine. Other cases went in broadly the same direction and many other criminal damage charges were dropped before reaching court [since] police and prosecutors saw little hope of juries and magistrates siding with an Israeli arms firm.

This is roughly how things stood through to late spring or early summer of 2024, when it seems that Home Office, the Crown Prosecution Service, the police, and members of the Israeli lobby decided on a change of plan. As you might expect, in the report he published in May 2024, Lord Walney singled out Palestine Action “one of the groups in [the broader Palestine solidarity] movement that has most aggressively engaged in law breaking and business disruption,”[38] and his report urged the government to consider “further tightening several laws, to strengthen the legislative framework for responding to political protest, political violence, and disruption. The Government must ensure that police consider the cumulative disruption and harm done to a particular group by a succession of extreme political protests, such as the explosion of antisemitic hate crime currently being experienced by many Jewish people coinciding with the Gaza protests.”

By the summer of 2024 the UK government and its police had clearly accepted much of Walney’s advice. As the Filton 25 campaign group point out, “meetings between government ministers, Elbit Systems, the Israeli embassy, the police, the CPS, the Attorney General’s office and the home office, on Palestine Action, have taken place since the group launched in 2020. In June 2024, before anyone in Palestine Action was arrested under counter-terror powers for direct action, the counter terror police met with the CPS, to discuss proscribing Palestine Action. To do this, they needed ‘terrorist’ offenses to justify the ban. Two months later, they arrested the Filton defendants for terrorism.”[39] By doing so, they significantly expanded the court’s capacity to silence the defendants.

Remember, the question as to whether a judge might give permission to defendants to explain their actions isn’t so much a narrow or technical legal question as a very expansive political and moral one. Remember, also, for reasons too obvious to mention, that no crime stretches the significance of any legal proceeding more than the crime of genocide. There was a time, not too long ago, when this really was too obvious to mention, and it might have seemed absurd even to mention it. Not anymore. These days, in some circles, genocide looks like less like a crime than a business model — less a scandalous break in the continuum of history than robust application of an increasingly acceptable operating procedure. Since it remains as responsive as ever to the way the prevailing winds might blow, it seems the English judicial system is rapidly adapting to a rather startling change in the political weather — a systematic accommodation to the needs and norms of a new age of genocide.

The six Filton activists broke into Elbit’s Bristol factory in August 2024, and after being held (unlawfully?) on remand for sixteen months their trial finally began in November 2025. If these defendants had been up for trial in a place like Liverpool in a year like 1996, like Andrew Needham and her comrades, perhaps the state’s prosecution would never have got off the ground. Here is a small group of six highly and obviously principled and courageous people who, rather than keep pleading with a complicit government, rather than keep appealing to indifferent members of Parliament, decided to take our obligation to prevent genocide seriously and literally, and act on it. Like Needham and Zelter, the Filton crew set out to damage military equipment that they believed would be used to kill civilians. Like their Ploughshares predecessors they likewise publicised their actions, and proudly assumed responsibility for what they done. If anything, given the flagrant enormity of Israel’s crimes in Gaza since October 2023, you might assume that they could have gone into their trial, in November 2025, confident that they would be able to persuade any reasonable jury — i.e. any random group of people who might themselves oppose genocide — that their actions could be condoned as both legitimate and necessary.

But what in fact happened? You guessed it: rather than give them an opportunity to justify their recourse to criminal damage, the judge assigned to the Filton case — Mr Justice Jeremy Johnson — instead ordered them to keep quiet. Judge Johnson first condemned the Filton defendants to silence, then he condemned them to prison.[40]

Even just a few months ago, however, it was still relatively difficult simply to order complete silence all at once, so judge Johnson has had to prolong his persecution of the Filton defendants over two steps: first their trial, then their re-trial. The first Filton trial began on 17 November 2025, and thanks to the laborious efforts of the Free the Filton 25 campaign, and of Real Media, readers can easily follow its course in considerable detail.[41] For our purposes here what matters most is that, although Judge Johnson managed to impose significant restrictions on the defence, he wasn’t able to shut them up entirely. In particular, in a speech that is already assured of its place in British legal history, the lead barrister for the defence, Rajiv Menon KC, was still able to follow Trudi Warner’s example and remind the jury of their basic rights. He was still able to remind them, subtly but unequivocally, of the principle of jury equity. Again his words are worth quoting at length.

You may have noticed, Rajiv Menon told the jury, in his closing speech on 8 January 2026, that judge Johnson has set strict limits on what the defendants can say, and from this you might have inferred, understandably, that he is also effectively instructing you to convict them. Before Menon drew the jury’s attention to the Bushel precedent of 1670 (as cited above) and the all-important principle of jury equity, he made a couple of preliminary points that relate to our concern with intention and with necessity defence or lawful excuse. He began by reminding them that, in one context after another, “great changes come about because of the extraordinary courage and personal sacrifice of ordinary people.” He illustrated this point with the example of the suffragettes, whose slogan was “deeds, not words.” The suffragettes “understood that men would never give women the vote unless forced to do so. Asking politely was a waste of time. They organised large marches and rallies and engaged in civil disobedience and direct action. They vandalised property, chained themselves to buildings, and disrupted political meetings. When imprisoned, they went on hunger strike, leading to brutal force-feeding by the authorities.” Though they were criminalised and widely vilified at the time, Menon observed, today “we celebrate the suffragettes for their heroism and for securing the vote for women.” He then recalled how, after hearing the defendants’ testimony,

a jury member sent a note to His Lordship [i.e. judge Johnson] asking the following question. “If we decide that they genuinely believe that they were performing life-saving action and were morally compelled to destroy weapons they believed were going to be used to kill civilians in what they believe to be an illegal genocide, would that amount to a lawful excuse?”

It was an excellent question, and the next day His Lordship gave an answer along the following lines: “If a defendant genuinely believed that they were performing life-saving action and was morally compelled to destroy weapons which they believe were going to be used to kill civilians in what they believe to be an illegal genocide, then that would not count as a lawful excuse, and I will give you full directions on this issue at the end of the case”.

In other words, the answer to the question was that the judge had already ruled as a matter of law, before hearing from the defendants, that they did not have a lawful excuse for damaging property belonging to Elbit Systems. And if you turn to the judge’s legal directions, paragraph 3.8. “As I told you when you asked a question about this, if a defendant believed that they were morally justified in doing what they did to prevent what they thought was a genocide, then that would not amount to a lawful excuse. There is no evidence in this case of anything that is capable in law of amounting to a lawful excuse, so that is not something that you need to consider” [my emphases].

According to judge Jeremy Johnson, in other words, the reasons given by the Filton activists for their actions, were most definitely not something the jury should consider as they decided whether to convict or acquit.

Earlier in this closing speech to the jury, Menon nevertheless managed to evoke some of the pertinent facts the defence team had sought to foreground, in their constrained explanation of the defendants’ actions. He recalled that “Elbit produces 85% of the weapons used by the Israeli military, that Elbit produces drones, munitions, and battle simulators,” that “Elbit’s CEO gave a talk during which he boasted that war was good for business,” etc. He reminded the jury that “if any of the evidence that any of the defendants gave you about Elbit was false or exaggerated or misleading, the prosecution would have challenged that evidence, but they didn’t. So you can be sure that what the defendants told you about this company is true.”[42] He reminded the jury, furthermore, that only you “can decide what weight to give the evidence you’ve heard about Elbit, or any other evidence,” before emphasising the obvious fact that, in this case, “it might be important to take into account, indeed to remember at all times, that the target of this action was a massive weapons company that has played a critical role in the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians, as opposed to, for example, a company that makes fluffy toys for children.”

Rajiv Menon KC then addressed the heart of the matter:

So it boils down to this. However strange it might seem, given the facts of the case are solely for you, judges are entitled, as a matter of law in our system, to withdraw defences from the consideration of the jury if they conclude that there is no evidence to support the defence. And that is what His Lordship has done in this case. That’s why when you turn to the Route To Verdict under Count Two — criminal damage — the words lawful excuse do not appear in either of the questions. [… Instead] the questions are: “Are you sure that property in Elbit’s premises was intentionally destroyed or damaged by one or more of the defendants?” and “Are you sure that the defendant either personally destroyed or damaged property or encouraged or assisted another person to do so, intending that the property be destroyed or damaged?” His Lordship, as a matter of law, has withdrawn the defence of lawful excuse from your consideration. […]

So that’s what His Lordship said to you, and [prosecuting barrister] Ms Heer in her closing speech, on much the same theme, told you that the defendants who had given evidence had not raised any real challenge to the charge of criminal damage. I’m sorry, but it is not right to say that the defendants who gave evidence did not raise any challenge. They did raise a challenge. They maintained that they had a lawful excuse. That was their challenge. But what’s happened is that His Lordship has withdrawn that defence as a matter of law, and that’s the true position that we find ourselves in. Their challenge was lawful excuse and the court has withdrawn that as a lawful defence. So where does that leave you, the members of the jury?

Asking this, Menon is here posing, in the clearest possible terms, the most essential legal question of our moment. Where indeed does this leave the jury — and more importantly, where does this leave all of us who might want to see justice be done in a law-abiding society? Menon’s own attempt to answer this question, while also trying to dance round the judge’s attempt to foreclose it in advance, is already widely and rightly recognised as one of the great arguments of contemporary legal history. You could be forgiven, he tells the jury, for thinking that by so severely restricting what the accused can say in their defence, judge Johnson

is in fact directing you, as a matter of law, to convict [them] of criminal damage. But you’d be wrong to think that. His Lordship is not directing you to convict. In fact, not only is he not directing you to convict, but he’s also absolutely forbidden from doing so as a matter of law. The law is crystal clear on this point. No judge in any criminal case is allowed to direct a jury to convict any defendant of any criminal charge, whatever the evidence might be. That is the law. Please remember that fundamental principle at all times when you retire. Please don’t misinterpret anything in His Lordship’s directions or summing up (which will follow the defence speeches) as amounting to a legal direction to convict. That would be a terrible mistake to make. I repeat, His Lordship is absolutely not directing you to convict, because he’s barred as a matter of law from doing so.

As he makes this crucial point, Menon also helps to clarify the central question at issue in the present essay, and arguably the central question at issue in our wider politico-judicial moment: to what extent does an activist or protestor, or indeed anyone at all, have a legally sanctioned right to explain why they believe they did the right thing? “The jury has every right to be confused about this,” continues Menon,

because it is confusing. You have every right to think that the distinction between withdrawing the only available defence to a criminal charge on the facts, and a direction to convict, is at best a distinction without a difference. You have every right to think that the two effectively amount to the same thing. But the fact of the matter is they are absolutely not the same thing […]. The key point to summarise is that the facts, and the verdicts you return having considered the facts, are solely for you. Nobody, not even His Lordship, can direct you as to what factual conclusions to reach. Nobody, not even His Lordship, can direct you to convict. It’s as simple as that. That’s the law.

Crucially, Menon’s speech helps to explain why only the principle of jury equity offers a clear alternative to the prevailing confusion. What makes the Filton case a little different from the practice of jury nullification that I mentioned towards the beginning of this essay is that the juries who have so far acquitted Palestine Action activists of charges like criminal damage haven’t directly tried to argue that the statutes criminalising such damage are themselves wrong or immoral (in the way that American juries of the 1850s did, when they nullified attempts to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act). Remember there is always a basic and somewhat undecidable spectrum, between outright rejection of a law as unlawful or unjust, and a more limited or deferential refusal to apply it to a particular case. In the Pal Action trials, generally, the issue hasn’t been whether damage per se is or isn’t a crime, since in the narrow sense it’s clearly illegal according to entrenched English conceptions of private property. In any case nobody can argue that to destroy an object doesn’t involve its destruction, even if that object is a weapon or drone intended to kill people in an illegal war. The key issues at stake here are indeed the principles of lawful excuse and jury equity and all that they entail, i.e. a jury’s right to hear all the pertinent facts of the case, and then to make up their own minds about what is right and wrong.

XII

After listening to Rajiv Menon and the rest of the defence team, on February 2026 the jury in the first Filton trial refused to convict any of the defendants on any charge. They were all acquitted of the most serious accusation, aggravated burglary, and they were all also found not guilty of violent disorder. The jury could not agree, however, about whether they might be guilty of criminal damage. They also couldn’t agree about whether one defendant, Samuel Corner, accused of striking a police officer with a sledgehammer, might be guilty of causing grievous bodily harm.

This indecisive verdict was both “a huge victory for moral courage in face of political pressure” and a new opportunity for the government prosecutors determined to make an example of the Filton activists. Rather than accept that they might be innocent, the government immediately decided to retry them, primarily on the main outstanding charge of criminal charge. To make sure things went smoothly the second time round the prosecution, at a minimum, would have to achieve two things: it would have to impose even more severe restrictions on the lines of argument available to defence, and it would have to take any barrister as eloquent and effective as Rajiv Menon out of the equation.

The second of these objectives was easily accomplished, at least to begin with. In early March, Mr Justice Jeremy Johnson initiated proceedings against Rajiv Menon, accusing him of contempt of court. This is apparently the first time, in British legal history, that a barrister has ever faced contempt of court for the contents of their closing speech. Menon’s speech was an inspiring tour de force on its own terms; Johnson’s persecution of Menon has already immortalised it. In early May, when his case when to the court of appeal, Menon managed to deflect the move to hold him in contempt, though Johnson may still have the option of pursuing him via the Attorney General.

The first objective was even easier to achieve. Since it is essentially left to a judge’s discretion to decide on the parameters of what, in his or her court, the accused might include in their line of defence, in the Filton retrial that began on 13 April 2026, judge Johnson effectively decided, in advance, to prevent the accused from arguing any line of defence at all. As the Filton campaign group has tried to explain, “all defences on the charge of criminal damage were banned by the Judge before he heard the evidence, meaning the defendants weren’t allowed to argue that their actions were legally justified as they acted to save lives and prevent a greater crime. He also barred the defendants from telling the jury about their motivations for taking action, their emotional reactions to the massacres of Palestinians or the illegality of Israel’s actions.”

A draft summary of Johnson’s instructions to the defence team, dated 27 April 2026, regarding points they could not make in their closing speeches to the jury, offers a striking indication of the rules he applied to the case as whole. In order to make sure no defence advocate dared to repeat the arguments that Menon had made so effectively back in January, judge Johnson first settled a couple of procedural questions. He told the defence barristers that they could not, “without first securing the court’s permission in the jury’s absence […], invite the jury to apply the principle of jury equity; refer to the principle of jury equity,” or “inform the jury […] that a judge may not direct a jury to convict.” So much for certain treasured principles of the English legal tradition.

Johnson then proceeded to explain what could and could not be mentioned as pertinent to the facts of the case. On the one hand, as far as the prosecution was concerned, it was obviously pertinent to consider how far the accused might have “intended” to break into the Filton factory, and perhaps also to consider how far they might also have “intended” to injure security guards and/or police officers. On the other hand, wrote Johnson, it was clearly not pertinent, and thus now strictly forbidden, to mention any of the substantial reasons that might in turn have motivated these surface-level intentions. Incredibly, judge Johnson told the defence barristers that, in principle, they could not refer to:

Elbit’s activities in manufacturing weapons and supplying them to Israel; the nature of the property that the defendants damaged or destroyed; the defendants’ beliefs that weapons and other technology at Elbit’s factory would be used to kill or injure others, including children; the fact that the defendants were arrested for terrorism offences […]; the history of the Middle East, including events in the Middle East since 7 October 2023, Israel’s activities in Gaza, and the jury’s background knowledge and/or view about those events.

Johnson’s sweeping instructions take us, in brief, straight back to the dismal authoritarian world of Sir Matthew Hale. As far as Johnson and Hale are concerned, theft is theft and criminal damage is criminal damage, anywhere and everywhere. Who cares about why or who? Who cares about reasons or context? What legal difference might it make, if such damage is undertaken to disrupt either a company that makes fluffy toys for children on the one hand or a company that makes drones used to kill children on the other?

The currently prevailing answer to this question tells you quite a lot about the political and moral principles of the current UK government and its legal system.

XIII

Confronted by judge Johnson’s restrictions, on 28 April 2026 Rajiv Menon and most of the other Filton defence barristers decided that they had no option but to withdraw from the case.[43] Johnson told them, in effect: in this court you may not do your job, so either quit now or shut up. Given the alternatives, and in full agreement with the defendants, Menon and his colleagues withdrew and left all but one of the final speeches to the defendants themselves.

Though still limited in what they could say, on the final day of their retrial the defendants were at least able to address some of the most fundamental aspects of their case. Speaking in their own name, and thus without the technical “authority” attached to a certified barrister, they could at least refer to some aspects of their own story, and thus mention some of the reasons that had led them to undertake this course of action and to its evaluation by this jury.[44] The final speeches these defendants then gave to the jury, on 29 April 2026, to address these things, are by any standard some of the profoundly moving and inspiring things I have ever read. In the spirit of Penn and Bushel, these speeches should be read out, in full, in classrooms and meeting halls across this country. Pending that, and given the constraints of space, I can quote here only a few extracts, limited in each case to the essential (but systematically occluded) point at issue — the reasons why, faced with the obvious fact of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, each of the defendants had eventually decided to do what they did.

Charlotte Head (or Lottie, aged 28 in August 2024, domestic abuse caseworker): When I was on the stand, I was asked why direct action is necessary and I told you that it’s because the government doesn’t listen when people like you and me “ask nicely”. They have too much invested, both politically and financially, to act on a moral basis. We tried “asking nicely” and playing by their rules and they flat out ignored us.

I don’t believe that wanting to stop human suffering, to stop tens of thousands of innocent people being killed is a fringe belief. I believe it is a commonly held view that underpins what it means to live in a just and humane society. I don’t agree that just because something is deemed incorrect by those in power at this point in history means that it is the wrong thing to do. Slavery used to be legal. Apartheid in South Africa was deemed legal. Myriad evils have been legal at one point or another — but that does not make them justified.

And you are able to serve on this jury because people dared to imagine a better world. People believed that they could change it for the better, despite any opposition.

Leona Kamio (or Ellie, aged 28 in 2024, musician, farmer and nursery school teacher): Every one of the kids that I have looked after was the centre of someone’s world — their mum, their dad, their grandparents — and to imagine what it would be like for any of them with what was happening in Palestine, it literally broke me. I was sick of crying on my bed, witnessing massacres and feeling helpless. And that was the moment that I signed up to Palestine Action.

Yesterday the prosecutors said that we refuse to take responsibility. That’s not true. The truth is that our system puts the power in the hands of ordinary people to decide whether we’re guilty or not. For those of us that aren’t in power, we go through our lives feeling powerless and like we don’t have a choice sometimes. But today, you are the people in power and you are the ones with the choice. Regardless of who the state decides to protect, I have faith in people. And that’s why I am standing in front of you.

Fatema Zainab Rajwani (aged 20, film student and poet): I apologise if I seem a bit nervous. This is my first time doing anything like this […] You’ve heard me — in that witness stand — own up to disarming those drones because they were going to kill children. And I told you how I was sick of waiting for the government to dig this well for me. On the contrary, it is my privilege and my honour to stand trial for disarming Israeli military drones. It is my honour to stand in front of you as someone who has told you from this stand that the belief that drives their life is simple, that to save one life is to save all of humanity.

Jordan Devlin (aged 30, musician and sculptor): [The prosecution tells you that] if people were acquitted on good character, the law would be incapable of providing protection to anyone. The law has already failed to protect those innocents born of good character killed by Elbit weapons. You the jury have massive power in shaping the future of British protest law and British history. We did the right thing, and you do not need to explain your verdicts, you have the independence to make your own minds up about all of the facts you’ve heard.

Samuel Corner (aged 22, philosophy student and organiser): I was protecting her.[45]

Zoe Rogers (aged 20, student of interdisciplinary studies): I’m an ordinary person, with friends, family, a place at university, a cat I love, basically a whole lot to lose by going to prison. But you know that we all actually intended to be arrested on the 6th of August. We intended to go to trial. The reason I was willing and confident enough to allow that, was because I knew that now, twenty months in the future, I would be standing in front of twelve ordinary people like you. Not politicians, not legal experts, not barristers and judges wearing 400 year-old horsehair on their heads, but a panel of my equals.

You are the best counterweight to power and tyranny within the legal system as it exists today. It is a privilege to be judged by you [and…] I want you to know that whatever you decide, I will not hold it against you. How can I when you have been kept so in the dark. But you can be sure of one thing. I am proud, I am so proud that I took part in this. I am proud that I overcame my fear and took action, because of course I was scared, you don’t just break into an Israeli weapons factory for fun! And I can say with absolute certainty that this is the best thing I have ever done, because there is a good chance that because of our actions that night, innocent lives were saved.

After taking a couple of days to deliberate, after listening to the accused and their accusers, after pondering judge Johnson’s instructions and restrictions, on 5 May 2026 the jury at the Filton 6 retrial returned with a mixed bundle of verdicts. Zoe Rogers and Jordan Devlin were acquitted of all charges. Charlotte Head, Samuel Corner, Leona Kamio, and Fatema Zainab Rajwani were found guilty of criminal damage against Elbit Systems, and Samuel Corner was also found guilty of grievous bodily harm (albeit without intent — a proviso which all by itself has life-changing consequences).

As I’ve mentioned, it remains an essential pillar of the judicial system, that following secret deliberations a jury has the right to issue a verdict, and no-one can argue with it. Whatever we might make of these verdicts, however, it’s hard to see how the court can justify the next and most ominous step it has taken during the whole Filton trial story.

The jurors who were summoned to pass judgement on the Filton defendants were asked, by the judge, to make decisions on a perfectly clear and specific set of charges. They were asked, primarily, to decide whether they thought Samuel Corner, Jordan Devlin, Charlotte Head, Leona Kamio, Fatema Rajwani and Zoe Rogers were guilty of criminal property damage, i.e. of destroying munitions produced by Elbit Systems. The jury heard what they were allowed to hear, and they made their decision. They did so knowing that a conviction for criminal damage would only very rarely carry a prison term, for first time offenders, of more than two or three years. Since the defendants had already spent a full 18 months in prison on remand, the jury convicted the Filton 4 on a charge whose punishment had, most likely, already been spent.

What the jury (and indeed the wider British public) did not and could not know, as they pondered the fate of the Filton defendants, was that they had actually been summoned to prepare for a quite different decision. Without telling the jury, sometime before the Filton retrial began its judge and prosecutors had decided to pursue it along two parallel tracks at once. To the jury and anyone who might be listening in the public galleries, the court said that the jury was called to decide on ordinary charges of criminal damage, charges that might ordinarily lead to a relatively short amount of prison time or a relatively minor fine. Behind the scenes, however, this same judge, presumably in close collaboration with key players at the highest level of government, had perhaps already decided to sentence the defendants, if convicted, on very different and much more severe grounds. Now that they have been duly convicted, more or less as instructed, judge Johnson is poised to sentence them on the grounds of an apparent but remarkably vague “terrorist connection.”

Drawing on her Parliamentary privilege, the MP Zarah Sultana was one of the first to blow a public whistle about this when she told the Commons, on 14 April 2026, that

six Palestine Action activists face retrial after being acquitted in February following a year in prison. If convicted, they and 18 others will be sentenced as terrorists, but the jury will not be told that. The jury could convict them on criminal damage charges with no idea that terrorism sentences will follow. Not a single terrorism charge has been brought forward. The proscription [of Palestine Action] has been ruled unlawful, and the defendants themselves have been banned from telling the jury that they acted to stop genocide under threat of contempt charges. This is what a stitch-up looks like, and it is part of the same pattern: a Labour Government that will do whatever it takes to silence dissent, protect Israeli death factories and escape accountability.

Articles subsequently published by Grayzone and DeClassified UK soon added more details to the story, and a helpfully concise open letter circulated by the Filton defence campaign in May 2026 distils the key point: “The jury did not convict these defendants of terrorism. Nor did it convict them of entering Elbit with intent to injure people. All six defendants were acquitted of aggravated burglary, and Sam Corner was acquitted of GBH with intent. The convictions now being used to invite a terrorism connection are, for these four defendants, convictions for criminal damage to military equipment,” nothing more. Another open letter, signed and circulated at this same time by Michael Mansfield KC and a number of other prominent lawyers and Law professors, expands on this point. “Damage to property has been a recurring feature of protest campaigns from the Suffragettes and the women of Greenham Common to Extinction Rebellion and the Trident Ploughshares movement. Military equipment has often been the target,” as it was again in the Fairford Five’s protest against the Iraq War in 2003. Up until now, however, “it has never previously even been suggested that those taking such action should be treated as terrorists. Blurring the distinction between principled direct action and terrorism is the hallmark of authoritarian regimes.” As Palestine Action’s co-founder Huda Ammori put it during an open call organised by Defend Our Juries on 21 May, “in every single way, this is more outrageous than the proscription of Palestine Action itself.”

In any legal setting, and for what might seem like perfectly understandable reasons, as soon as the word “terrorism” is pronounced a lot of things change very quickly and very dramatically. Reference to the imperative demands of national security can easily trump all other considerations. Evidence that might normally need to be shared or made public can be kept private, and restricted to people considered reliable enough for “security clearance.” Decision that might normally require explicit justification can be left to the discretion of anonymous officials charged with ensuring public safety.

XIV

The Filton trials have now clearly emerged as the test case for this new wave of anti-protest measures, and for this newly authoritarian consolidation of judicial power and impunity. With respect to our recurring questions regarding the judicial status of an actor’s motive or intention, four last points deserve particular emphasis.

First of all, as mentioned before, the government’s decision to prosecute the defendants as “terrorists” can plausibly be traced back to discussions that began before the Filton operation itself even took place. Huda Ammori and the Filton 25 campaign date the decisive meetings that led the Home Office, counter-terrorism police and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to prosecute Palestine Action members as terrorists to June 2024, i.e. two months before the Filton operation (and so just a few weeks before the change in some governing personnel that followed the general election of 4 July 2024). It seems that the August 2024 decision to investigate the Filton defendants with a “terrorist connection” was a key part of a longer and more far-reaching strategic decision taken, in the spring of 2025, to proscribe the group Palestine Action itself, in its entirety, as a supposedly terrorist organisation. Though it may be difficult to know for sure, is it implausible also to suggest, given the speed and startling brutality of the police and guards’ response to the Filton break-in on 6 August, that it might perhaps have been intended to provoke some sort of apparently “violent” reaction from one or more of the Filton activists?[46]

This tangled story deserves more detailed discussion on its own right, of course, but it’s clear that the Conservative-and-Labour governments’ whole anti-terrorist strategy plays on a basic equivocation. On the one hand, the Terrorism Act of 2000 defines terrorism in such a loose and open-ended way that it authorises government and police to proscribe a group as “terrorist” if it simply undertakes “serious criminal damage,” so long as it can plausibly link such damage to an apparent intention to “influence the government.” On the other hand, the British public, like any public, still tends to associate “terrorism” with the actual meaning of the word, i.e. with the threat or use of terrifying violence against people, and ordinarily against a significant number of people, e.g. the sorts of action associated with other proscribed groups like ISIS or Boko Haram. This is why Yvette Cooper and others determined to denounce Palestine Action as terrorist have so often gone to considerable lengths to portray the group as “violent,” i.e. as guilty of using violence against persons.

This poses a problem, however, since Palestine Action is a pointedly and emphatically non-violent group, one whose whole raison d’être is to condemn systematic state violence against persons. To this day, only one single accusation of violent crime has been levelled at any member of Palestine Action — the (genuinely absurd) charge of “grievous bodily harm with intent” that was levelled at Filton activist Samuel Corner. After being blinded with PAVA spray and understandably panicked by the violent arrest of his comrade Ellie Kamio, Corner did indeed harm a police officer with his sledgehammer — but as his barrister made perfectly clear, he clearly did so unintentionally. Despite the implausible if not defamatory insinuations of the prosecution, it’s obvious that none of the Filton activists entered Elbit’s factory with any sort of plan to commit any acts of violence against anyone, and Corner clearly didn’t intend to harm anyone — he intended, as he explained, to protect his friend when she was herself violently arrested.[47] Even though the retrial verdict did convict Corner of GBH, they judged this to be without intent — and so whatever remains of prolonged and deceitful government attempts to portray Palestine Action as an essentially violent organisation is left without any sort of foundation at all.

None of those determined to prosecute Palestine Action for violence, both in the court of public opinion and in the courts of criminal law, have ever been able to contradict Palestine’s explicit and emphatic condemnation of all violence. “Why on earth.” asked their barrister in January, “would they suddenly, after years, abandon nonviolent direct action and embrace a wholly different approach involving planned violence with sledgehammers against security guards? What’s been alleged doesn’t make any sense. Palestine Action was not an organisation of violent people who assaulted security guards during their actions. […] Using violence against security guards would have been completely antithetical, completely contrary to the aims, objectives of this organisation and their strategy of nonviolent direct action, and not to mention utterly counterproductive.”

In the Filton case, then, the one and only actually-existing legal basis for treating the defendants as “terrorists” remains their rather humdrum conviction for ordinary property damage — damage that is only exceptional on account of the lethal objects they intended to destroy. “Despite the smear campaign,” argues Huda Ammori (during a meeting in May 2026), “the terrorism accusation has nothing to do with violence and everything to do with protecting Israel’s business of war — at the expense of our freedoms and rights.”

Second, and as mentioned at the start of this essay, it’s no coincidence that the Filton sentences will be handed down just before the court of appeal finally reaches a verdict on whether or not the government’s proscription of Palestine Action was itself lawful. In mid-May it was confirmed that the court would issue its ruling on 15 June, i.e. just three days after the Filton 4 are sentenced on 12 June. As Defend Our Juries quickly observed in response, in a circular message to supporters on 22 May 2026, “there is important strategic reasoning for this [timing]. The use of ‘terrorist connection’ sentencing could apply regardless of the proscription of Palestine Action. In fact, it could be used against any activist accused of criminal damage relating to any cause, regardless of whether they are connected to a group or organisation. This would be the first time in British history that this has ever happened. We must oppose this with all our might.”

Third point: when it comes to passing a sentence, an obviously principled or conscientious motive should normally lessen the punishment imposed on a defendant. “While law tends to exclude motivation evidence when determining a defendant’s guilt,” notes Paddy Friend, “usually motive is allowed back in at the moment of sentencing, as either a ‘mitigating’ or ‘aggravating’ factor. Crucially this has the effect of taking consideration of motive away from the jury and into the hands of the judge.”[48] An especially malevolent motive might increase the severity of a judge’s sentence, a benevolent one might lessen it. Of course, if a judge is so inclined (as Lord Hoffman argued in a much-cited passage in R v. Jones [2006][49]), they may look favourably on conscientious actors — but it all depends on the judge. “What counts for good or bad motive is not left at large in the community,” as Allan Norrie observes, instead “it is kept politically safe with the judges, far away from the noise and conflict of the world outside. The social mores of the ‘common people’ are mediated, for good or ill, by the judges’ perception of them.”[50] No less than figures like Lord Walney, Priti Patel or Yvette Cooper, Mr Justice Jeremy Johnson certainly seems to have a rather distinctive perception of our social mores. What is then so ominous and “frightening about the Filton terror connection argument,” concludes Friend, is that it now “takes this same logic but then goes one step further and implies that conscientious motivation might be an aggravating as opposed to a mitigating factor.” Rather than principled peace activists, the Filton activists may well be sentenced instead as fanatical “terrorists.”

As far as the jury’s own deliberations and verdict are concerned, it seems hard to deny that the judge has compromised the jury’s own understanding of their role. They intended to speak the truth about one thing, but they have effectively been used to allow the judge to punish the defendants for quite a different thing.

Fourth point: judge Johnson’s contrived terrorism accusation itself requires a rather contorted understanding of criminal liability i.e. intention. For the reasons I’ve explained, if the Filton defendants can be classified as “terrorists” at all, this is simply because the Terrorism Act of 2000 includes “serious property damage” in its idiosyncratic and highly problematic definition of terrorism. Mere damage to property by itself, however, still isn’t enough to justify a prosecution for terrorism per se. If it’s to sentence some defendants as terrorists, a court must also show that the actions they might have taken to damage property were in addition intended to “influence the government” or an “international governmental organisation.”

What judge Johnson’s jury didn’t know, when they deliberated over the fate of the Filton activists, is that during a preliminary hearing Johnson had ruled that, even if their actions might not qualify as terrorist on the more intuitive grounds of recourse to actual terror or violence against persons, it might still be argued that the activists had been trying to influence a government, if not exactly “the” government — if not the British one then perhaps the Israeli one. With respect to section 1 of the 2000 Terrorism Act (which refers to actions or threats “designed to influence the government” or an IGO) Johnson recognised that the Rajiv Menon and the other defence barristers had “strongly argued that influencing government was not the purpose of the action — the purpose of the action was to damage weapons and save lives — I accept that this was one motivating factor — but that does not mean that another purpose was not to damage property to be made available to the Israeli government and thereby influence the Israeli government.” If such motivation could be demonstrated, Johnson said, then it would be consistent with section 1.1(b) of the Terrorism Act, thereby establishing a “terrorist connection” for the purposes of the Sentencing Act 2020, section 69(3). The logic is similar to that used to justify dramatic “terrorism enhancement” of penalties applied to federal felonies in the US. (Though of course we can’t be sure, perhaps we can assume that judge Johnson himself doesn’t think that it might be reasonable or even obligatory, given both the imperatives of the Genocide Convention and the current priorities of the Israeli government, to try to influence its emphatic determination to persist with the ethnic cleansing of Gaza).

This last point is especially ironic, as regards the actual intentions of the defendants, since perhaps the single most distinctive feature of Palestine Action’s recourse to literally direct action is the way this is construed as a clear alternative to mere attempts to influence government per se. Whereas more conventional exercises in civil disobedience may involve “breaking the law in order to force a government or institution to create policy changes,” Huda Ammori has regularly explained that recourse to direct action “bypasses our complicit government and forces the necessary change ourselves — it doesn’t involve appealing to those who perpetrate Palestinian oppression.” From the start, Pal Action’s priority has been to “bypass politicians and go straight to the aggressors,” since if you can “stop a weapons factory from running, even for a day, you’ve already achieved something significant. The hope is that the sustained disruption of these firms will hit their profit margins, losing them contracts and ultimately forcing them to shut down.” Ammori concluded some time ago that, in the UK, “no mass movement is going to succeed if its main emphasis is on convincing the political class to stop supporting the Zionist regime. Unfortunately, the political class is immovable. Putting it at the centre of your strategy means you get sucked into a respectability politics which goes nowhere. That’s exactly what we’ve seen over the past eighteen months. Whereas if you take an approach that isn’t based on trying influence the government, you can actually empower people — you can show them that protest isn’t just symbolic, that it can achieve real results.”

XV

As with Zoe Rosenberg’s trial in California for conspiracy and trespass, it wouldn’t be quite right to say that the court which tried the Filton 6 blocked all reference to the actors’ intentions or motives. Judge Jeremy Johnson just blocked reference, overall, to what the actors’ themselves might have had to say to about their own intentions. The prosecution, by contrast, was free to say more or less everything they wanted to suggest about the apparent intentions of the accused, e.g. their alleged (and utterly absurd) “intention” to inflict harm on security guards, or their alleged (and still more absurd) “terroristic” intention to “influence the Israeli government by depriving it of weapons” — a suggestion so preposterous and surreal that it defies any further discussion here.

Well, you might ask, the difference does it make? No less than Andrea Needham and her associates before them, Charlotte Head and the other Filton activists candidly admitted in their own trial that they deliberately set out to damage Elbit’s products; why should it matter if such an action is treated as either criminal damage or terrorism?

The difference is in fact enormous. Defendants accused of “normal” criminal damage might ordinarily expect to serve around 40% of the prison time to which they are condemned. Since a four-year jail term would normally be close to the upper limit of a criminal damage conviction for first-time offenders, the Filton 4, having already spent eighteen months behind bars on remand, might ordinarily have been expected to be set free on 5 May, even if they were found guilty as charged. (To hold someone on remand for a full eighteen months, in contravention of the normal statutory limit of six months, is itself already a way of effectively sentencing them before they are even tried; it is a way of treating people as guilty long before they might begin to be “presumed innocent until…”). If, however, judge Johnson now sentences them with a “terrorist connection,” as the Filton campaign website explains,

their sentences will be aggravated, and they will have to serve their whole sentence in prison, unless a parole board approves their release after they spend two-thirds of their sentence. For them to be released by a parole board, they must be satisfied that the defendants are ‘reformed’ and rescind their beliefs. Upon release, they could be listed as terrorists for another 10-15 years, meaning any new device, bank account, email address, relationship, will have to be registered with the police for the rest of their life.

Leaving aside all the ways in which the partially automated genocidal annihilation of Gaza is itself part of a wider and grimly catastrophic “rehearsal for the future,” the difference is obviously enormous for the Filton 4. It is obviously enormous for them and for the other twenty Filton activists the UK police have decided to pursue in their determination to allow, come what may, Elbit Systems and associated companies to continue producing weapons of mass destruction on British soil. The difference is enormous for the tightly integrated Anglo-American-Israeli war industry, as they produce munitions for export to Israel or wherever else their use might contribute most effectively to broader imperial objectives. The difference is also obviously enormous for anyone else who might object to these obscene objectives, and who might decide, for lack of viable alternatives, that direct action against Elbit and associated companies is now the only way they might themselves meet, in all good conscience, the obligation we all share “to prevent and to punish genocide.”

The difference may further prove to be enormous for everyone who lives in the UK and who might want, at some point and for any reason, to protest against the prevailing priorities and laws of the government of the day. None of us should ever forget that, in the past, only sustained mass protest was sufficient to abolish flagrant evils like chattel slavery, child labour, gendered and racialised inequality, colonial domination, and so on. Each of these evils was defended as lawful and necessary by the great law lords of the day, by all those previous incarnations of judges like Silas Reid or Jeremy Johnson. As a group of healthworkers sympathetic to the Filton defendants have recently argued, “if criminal damage to weapons can be reframed as terrorism because it is politically motivated, then terrorism law becomes a tool for suppressing conscientious protest. That precedent should alarm every profession whose duties include the prevention of harm.”

Every such profession and indeed every British resident should be further alarmed that the Labour government which seems determined to suppress such protest has already taken several further and far-reaching steps in this same direction. Earlier this spring Keir Starmer’s Home Office took unprecedented steps to limit recourse to “cumulative” or repeated forms of protest (i.e. the sorts of protest that might be required to oppose a prolonged genocide or any structural injustice). A few weeks ago, Starmer reasserted his borderline-obsessive determination to prosecute, again along vaguely anti-terrorist lines, anyone who might still be defiant enough to affirm perfectly legitimate slogans like “globalise the intifada.“ Starmer’s government is also currently poised to restrict dramatically, by passing a new Courts and Tribunals Bill, the number of cases that may still be judged by juries rather than magistrates.

This last proposal is already sending particular ripples of alarm through the judicial system, and as Paddy Friend observes, although the 2026 Courts and Tribunals Bill is being “publicly justified under the guise of improving the criminal justice system’s ‘efficiency,’ there can be little doubt that its proposed removal of the right to a trial by jury in the vast majority of charges faced by activists (such as ‘criminal damage’, ‘aggravated trespass’, or ‘interfering with key national infrastructure’) is no coincidence.”[51]

Most enormous of all, perhaps, are the implications for what remains of popular sovereignty in the UK. Although there are good practical reasons for distinguishing between the judicial and legislative dimensions of law-making, in the end, as the expression goes, the law is the law. The crucial question remains who makes it and why. Ever since our ruling classes found ways to accommodate and neutralise the insurgent and egalitarian threats posed by mass claims to sovereign power in the legislative domain (e.g. by ensuring that what passes for “representative democracy” continues to represent the established interests of wealth and property), jury trials have become one of the last remaining institutional mechanisms that give ordinary people a chance to speak their mind about what should be legal or illegal. As things stand, something like the Filton trial gives a dozen ordinary people an opportunity to decide whether our government has got its priorities right, in its choice of defendants to prosecute.

Today’s British government is devoting huge amounts of police and legal resources not to preventing genocide but to enabling it — enabling it in the most concrete and tangible senses imaginable. Given a choice between shutting down an Israeli munitions company like Elbit Systems UK, a company which itself boasts of its unparalleled contribution to Israel’s war on Palestine, Starmer’s government has decided to protect the company and to prosecute instead its most forceful and effective critics. Rather than shut Elbit down, Starmer’s minister and judges have instead set out to ruin the lives, by all the means at their disposal, of those few peace activists who dared to take steps that might protect a few children in Gaza.

Not only that. Starmer’s judges, Mr Justices Jeremy Johnson and Silas Reid and their associates, haven’t only decided to make an example of those few protestors principled enough to risk everything by taking direct action against a murderous war machine. They have also decided to silence these protestors in the very trials that will determine their fate, trials that will shape the material course of their lives to come — trials that are also so clearly designed to discourage anyone else who might be courageous enough to follow such inspiring examples.

Judge Jeremy Johnson hasn’t only gagged the Filton defendants and their barristers. He hasn’t just restricted what their jury as allowed to hear. Along with the government he serves, he has contrived to tell the jury one thing while actually anticipating some else altogether. For the first time in British legal history, non-violent direct-action protestors are set to be sentenced as terrorists, and anyone who opposes or questions this risks being accused, by this same judge and his associates, of “contempt of court.”

What might accusations of such contempt now amount to, when this court has so emphatically and repeatedly rendered itself contemptible? How are we supposed to respond to a court that is prepared to prosecute barristers for referring to jury equity, that silences defendants, and that then tries these defendants for one thing before sentencing them for another?

If there is still such a thing as the “court of public opinion,” what should it now make of this other and altogether lower court?

2 June 2026

Notes

[1] This is an initial working draft of a longer work in progress. I’ve taken the risk of rushing this preliminary publication in order to be able to share it in the run-up to Filton re-trial sentencing hearing, scheduled for 12 June 2026, and I will be very glad (via p.hallward@kingston.ac.uk) of any corrections or comments. I should add two other caveats. First, as will quickly become obvious to any specialist in Law or legal theory, I’m writing this very much for a general audience, and began working on it as an exercise in self-education. Second, I refer here to cases and situations in the UK and US: I acknowledge the significant differences between the British and American legal traditions and systems, but in what follows I will focus more on things they have in common. I’m very grateful to Paddy Friend, David Renton, and Melissa Lane for their helpful comments on a preliminary version of this draft. Needless to say, responsibility for any errors that remain is entirely my own.

[2] “In November 2024, there were further raids, with anti-terror laws once again being misused, and 8 more activists subsequently remanded in custody, in relation to the same Filton action, taking the total to 18. In July 2025, a further 6 people were arrested and remanded to prison for the same action. […] On May 19th 2026, another person was charged in connection with the Filton case. This is Lewie of the Brize Norton 5, who at the time was already on remand, meaning without trial, for 10 months and counting for allegedly spraying paint onto a Voyager plane at RAF Brize Norton. He is awaiting trial in 2027. This made the Filton24, the Filton25.”

[3] In May 2024, Lord Walney published an influential and widely discussed report about how best to police what he calls “extreme protest groups,” exemplified by groups like Palestine Action and Just Stop Oil. Walney recommended, in brief, in that such groups be designated as disruptive “terrorists” and dealt with as such. “Militant groups like Palestine Action and Just Stop Oil,” Walney argued, “are using criminal tactics to create mayhem and hold the public and workers to ransom without fear of consequence. Banning terror groups has made it harder for their activists to plan crimes – that approach should be extended to extreme protest groups too.” In order to clamp down on such groups and curb the broader influence of “Far Left, anti-capitalist, anarchist, and anti-establishment ideologies,” Walney proposed that “the Government should develop a transparent mechanism to review police and Crown Prosecution Service charging decisions to ensure that public order and terrorism legislation is being appropriately implemented in respect of political protest.” Among other things, Walney said, “the police and Crown Prosecution Service should interpret and apply the law on encouraging terrorism broadly so any celebration of terrorist acts, or praise for terror groups and individuals, is viewed as a form of indirect encouragement” and prosecuted accordingly. I’ll come back to this report below.

[4] Concerned by the unwarranted severity of the British government’s prosecution of the Filton defendants, as early as 21 November 2024 Ben Saul and several other UN rapporteurs wrote to remind the British government that “treating “direct action”, albeit involving some violence, as “terrorism” over-states the nature of the conduct and seriously risks chilling the exercise of freedom of expression and opinion and the right to participate in public life, as well as political and public discourse. We are particularly concerned by the inappropriate use of the counter-terrorism legal framework during pre-charge detention, in relation to the security conditions under which detainees are held, and in the context of the potential aggravation of penalties in sentencing. […] Mere property damage, without endangering life, is not sufficiently serious to qualify as terrorism.”

[5] Paddy Friend, David Whyte and Guy Zilberman, Britain’s Political Prisoners (Centre for Climate Crime and Climate Justice, May 2026), online at https://ccccjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/BPP-Digital.pdf.

[6] As Glanville Williams puts it in his Textbook of Criminal Law (Stevens, 1983), “it is lamentable that, after more than a thousand years of continuous legal development, English law should still lack clear and consistent definitions of words expressing its basic concepts” (p. 73).

[7] A few varied contributions to the vast literature on this topic include Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics And Philosophy (University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Travis Hreno, “Jury Nullification and Participatory Democracy,” in Contemporary Political Participation and its Countervailing Effects on Civic Culture, ed. James Cockerham and Alexandra Cockerham (Vernon, 2026), 71ff; Melissa Schwartzberg, ‘Justifying the Jury: Reconciling Justice, Equality, and Democracy,” American Political Science Review 112:3 (2018), pp. 446-458.

[8] Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge University Press, 1998, 6:15.

[9] Hobbes, On the Citizen, 14:1; Hobbes Leviathan , ed. E. M. Curley (Hackett, 1994), 25:2.

[10] Patrick Devlin, The Judge (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 127; I’m grateful to Paddy Friend for sharing this reference.

[11] Overall, Thompson concluded, “one must grope back in our history – perhaps for several hundred years – to come upon a time which had less true respect for the values of democracy than we – or our ‘experts’ – have now.” .

[12] As a substantial Guardian report notes, in October 2022, DxE founder Wayne Hsiung and Paul Darwin Picklesimer “were found not guilty of burglary and theft for removing the two piglets from a Utah farm. And in March 2023, two activists – one of whom was Baywatch actor Alexandra Paul – were acquitted of all charges after removing two chickens from a truck in Merced, California. In both cases, the defense argued that the goal was not to steal property but to rescue animals that were sick and suffering. Veterinarians testified about the ill health of the animals. Another key point was that because of their condition, the animals had no monetary value to the companies – if anything, they were a financial liability. […] These acquittals were ‘pretty earth-shattering’, said Camille Labchuk, executive director of Animal Justice, a Canadian legal advocacy organization. ‘To me what it represented was the power of being able to tell people the stories of what animals endure, tell the personal stories of the rescuers.’ She added that it reflected ‘a real triumph of the ability of people to put aside their preconceived beliefs’ and ‘a real triumph of logic and reason’.”

[13] By thus “quite literally suspending the operation of law,” Defend Our Justices’ Paddy Friend helpfully suggests that jury nullification might be understood as “a form of Benjaminian divine violence: ‘a violence done to the violence of the law,’ or as one might call it a minor abolition” of unjust laws and institutions, one “geographically and temporally constrained within the context of a given trial but most certainly an annihilatory critique, ‘wholly inaccessible’ to law” (Paddy Friend, “Jury Nullification as Minor Abolition” [forthcoming; May 2026 working draft, ms. shared by email], p. 9 of 12.

[14] It’s certainly important to remember, as Paddy Friend notes, that “jury deliberations do not take place in isolation, but are always mediated by ideology and class struggle,” and we should also be careful to avoid confusing “a legalistic sort of deliberation amongst individuals” with a more systematically transformative or emancipatory politics (Friend, “Jury Nullification as Minor Abolition”, p. 10). Still, “as law professor Paul Butler put it in a 2010 New York Times op-ed, ‘nullification is like any other democratic power; some people may try to misuse it, but that does not mean it should be taken away from everyone else.’“

[15] In for instance Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 145, 155 (1968), Williams v. Florida, 399 U.S. 78 (1970).

[16] For more details and a wider range of views across the political spectrum, see Travis Hreno, “Necessity and Jury Nullification,” Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 20:2 (2007); Travis Hreno, “Jury Nullification and Participatory Democracy,” in Contemporary Political Participation and its Countervailing Effects on Civic Culture, ed. James Cockerham and Alexandra Cockerham (Vernon, 2026), 71-91; Clay S. Conrad, Jury Nullification: The Evolution of a Doctrine (Caroline Academic Press, 1998; re-ed. Cato Institute, 2014); Sherry F. Colb, “A Fresh Look at Jury Nullification,” Verdict 18 May 2017; Michael Huemer, “The Duty to Disregard the Law,” Criminal Law and Philosophy 12:1 (2018); Lawson Wright, “Originalism and Jury Nullification in America: A Legal Basis for the Restoration of a Lost Right,” Princeton Legal Journal 3:1 (2024). I’m grateful to Paddy Friend for several further pertinent references, including: Emilios Christodoulidis, “The Objection that Cannot Be Heard: Communication and Legitimacy in the Courtroom,” in Anthony Duff et al., eds., The Trial on Trial Volume 1: Truth and Due Process (Hart 2004); Awol Allo, Law and Resistance: Toward a Performative Epistemology of Law (PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2013); Tom Gann, “Holding the Public to Ransom: The Strategy and Tactics of Just Stop Oil,” New Socialist, 12 March 2023; Tom Gann and josie sparrow, “We Are All Palestine Action,” New Socialist 4 July 2025.

[17] Friend, “Jury Nullification as Minor Abolition,” p. 11.

[18] Just when Zoe Rosenberg was sentenced in California, over in Britain comparable restrictions put on the defence led to the convictions of several “open rescue” activists associated with the direct-action group Animal Rising, after they removed a number of beagles from a Marshall BioResources breeding compound in Cambridgeshire. As Rosenberg observed on 18 December 2025, “during their trial, they were not allowed to talk about the conditions of the puppies. In fact, when their attorney tried [to do so] during closing arguments, the judge paused proceedings and sent out the jury. The trial verdict was almost sealed, meaning the judge was going to prohibit the defendants from telling anyone what had happened. These dogs deserved to have their stories properly shared in court, but once again, those in power acted to keep the suffering of animals hidden.”

[19] The philosophical literature on this topic is again too vast to summarise, but a few points of reference remain: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (1762); Gertrude E.M. Anscombe, On Intention (Blackwell, 1957); Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford University Press, 1980); Alan Norrie, ‘Motive and Intention,’ Crime, Reason and History: A Critical Introduction to Criminal Law (Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 57-61.

[20] While we’re on this point let’s not forget, regarding the charge of genocide that South Africa filed against Israel in the International Court of Justice in early 2024, that as far as the question of motive is concerned, the international prosecution has plenty to go on. On 9 October 2023, Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant openly announced that his troops were “imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” The next day Major-General Ghassan Alian, head of Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) reinforced the point: faced with “human beasts”, “Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza. No electricity, no water, just damage.” Around the same time, Gallant’s advisor, retired Major General (and former head of the Israeli National Security Council) Giora Eiland proposed that, by depriving them of food and water, Israel’s government should force Gaza’s residents to make a simple choice, “to stay and to starve, or to leave”. And so on. Along related lines, more recently, Israeli ministers haven’t been reluctant to acknowledge their intentions to bomb southern Lebanon into conditions comparable to that of bombed-out Gaza; in the same way Israel Katz recently remarked that his government was only “awaiting a green light from the US” in order to return Iran “to the dark and stone ages.” And so on.

[21] The reference is to the article “Criminal Law,” American Jurisprudence (second edition), vol. 21, section 112; cited for instance in Michael Vitiello, “Victim Blaming: When Is it Legally Appropriate?,” Quinnipiac Law Review 41:1 (2022), p. 40, fn. 44. It should be added that not all criminal offenses involve mens rea: what’s known as a “strict liability” crime is “one where it is not necessary to prove any mental state of the defendant. All that needs to be shown is that the defendant caused a particular result or carried out a particular act. […] Most strict liability offences are minor offences,” e.g. an unintentional traffic violation (resulting in a parking ticket) or the unintentional “selling of a lottery ticket to a person under the age 16.”

[22] Stephen J. Morse, “Inevitable Mens Rea,” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 27:1 (2003), pp. 51-64; cf. Glanville Williams, Textbook of Criminal Law (Stevens, 1983), p. 73

[23] The literature on mens rea, as with all of the topics discussed here, is vast; see for instance Martin R. Gardner, The Mens Rea Enigma: Observations on the Role of Motive in the Criminal Law Past and Present (Utah Law Review 635-6 [1993]); R.A. Duff and Stuart Green, eds., Philosophical Foundations of Criminal Law (Oxford University Press, 2011), chs. 9 and 10; Geert-Jan Alexander Knoops, Mens Rea at the International Criminal Court (Brill, 2016).

[24] Alan Norrie, ‘Motive and Intention,’ Crime, Reason and History: A Critical Introduction to Criminal Law (Cambridge University Press, 2014), p.42.

[25] Norrie, Crime, Reason and History, pp. 45-6. What is most striking about our current legal system’s approach to criminal responsibility, concludes Norrie’s discussion of this point, is that it bases “its most central term [mens rea] on a psychological mental state which ignores the substantive moral issues which surround and inform it,” thereby restricting judgement to “individualist” and “technical legal forms of responsibility” alone. “We are dealing here with the evolution of a particular legal model of responsibility that was devised to exclude or marginalise difficult or contested moral issues from the law and the courtroom. The problems of motive and intention, or direct and indirect intention, stem from this earlier period’s separation of legal judgment from substantive moral issues. Since the technical approach to responsibility was founded on a desire to evade moral issues, it is not surprising that it has such difficulty in dealing with them when they arise today. Modern law is caught in a necessary, structural dynamic of excluding and re-admitting substantive moral issues into a technically conceived set of fault categories. […] The formal, legal problem discloses a social and historical foundation” (p. 72).

[26] Matthew Hale, The History of the Pleas of the Crown (Philadelphia: Robert H. Small, 1847), vol. 2, p. 312; cf. Norrie, Crime, Reason and History, pp. 44-5.

[27] Hale, Pleas of the Crown, vol. 1, pp. 53-4. “Men’s properties,” Hale adds, “would be under a strange insecurity, being laid open to other men’s necessities, whereof no man can possibly judge, but the party himself” (p. 54). As it happens, a version of precisely this same argument came up in Parliament just a couple of months ago, when on 26 March 2026 the co-founder of Defend Our Juries, Tim Crosland, was called to give evidence about the likely consequences of the Courts and Tribunals Bill currently working its way through the House of Commons. Among other things this bill will greatly restrict the use of jury trials. Crosland emphasised the importance of the principle of jury equity, i.e. the notion that a jury should be free, after reviewing all the pertinent aspects of a case, to acquit or convict according to their conscience. In the final minute of Crosland’s testimony, the Labour MP Alex McIntyre posed what he clearly considered to be a knock-down question. “Where would you draw the line? If someone says, ‘I’ve stolen a bottle of whisky to protest against Tesco,’ would they be included in the cases you are talking about?” Crosland wasn’t given any time to answer (which itself already tells you something about current Parliamentary priorities) but it’s easy to see how McIntyre’s question fits within a much older drive to restrict the issues a jury is allowed to consider. The question is indeed: what might deliberate or intentional “protest” mean in such a case? Is there a significant legal difference between someone who pockets a bottle of whisky because they are thirsty and can’t be bothered to pay for it, and someone who takes or destroys a bottle, or perhaps several bottles, in full public view, on camera, as part of a prolonged political campaign? Would it matter, for instance, if this violation of property rights occurred as the culmination of a long anti-addiction campaign modelled on something like the nineteenth century’s temperance movement, or as the culmination of coordinated public protest against supermarket advertising or pricing strategies? Will a jury called to make a judgement on the charge of theft be given permission to consider such concerns, yes or no? And more immediately: if the current Labour government gets its way, will a jury even be given the chance to hear such a case at all?

[28] As the 1884 judges explained, “[…] it is admitted that the deliberate killing of this unoffending and unresisting boy was clearly murder, unless the killing can be justified by some well-recognised excuse admitted by the law. It is further admitted that there was in this case no such excuse, unless the killing was justified by what has been called ‘necessity.’ But the temptation to the act which existed here was not what the law has ever called necessity. Nor is this to be regretted. […] To preserve one’s life is generally speaking a duty, but it may be the plainest and the highest duty to sacrifice it. War is full of instances in which it is a man’s duty not to live, but to die.” For a brief compilation of further legal opinions regarding necessity and other justification defences see https://gardencourtchambers.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/old/1593508727-protest_webinar.pdf (I’m grateful to Dave Renton for sharing this reference).

[29] See Andrea Needham, The Hammer Blow: How 10 Women Disarmed a War Plane (Peace News, 2016). “Expert witnesses included investigative journalist John Pilger, professor Paul Rogers of Bradford University School of Peace Studies, and José Ramos Horta, then an East Timorese representative and later president of independent Timor-Leste.”

[30] Needham further notes that, at the time – this was February 2016 – climate activists could now make an increasingly strong case for advancing a “necessity defence” in any trial involving direct action or disruption to the public. “Increasingly one could make that argument in terms of climate change. Either ‘using reasonable force to prevent crime’ or, if you’re charged with criminal damage, you’re allowed to use the defence that you were acting to prevent damage to property. So, arguably, one could say: ‘I destroyed this coal-mining equipment because burning fossil fuels is submerging people’s houses in islands in the Pacific.’ That’s possibly an arguable defence at this point in history.”

[31] Another pertinent case to consider is that of the Raytheon Nine, in Derry, Northern Ireland, who were acquitted in 2008 after they were allowed to explain the reasons for their action to the jury. “The jury has accepted,” said one of the defendants (Eamonn McCann), “that we were reasonable in our belief that: the Israel Defence Forces were guilty of war crimes in Lebanon in the summer of 2006; that the Raytheon company, including its facility in Derry, was aiding and abetting the commission of these crimes; and that the action we took was intended to have, and did have, the effect of hampering or delaying the commission of war crimes. We have been vindicated.”

[32] Patrick Devlin, The Hamlyn Lectures: Trial by Jury (Stevens & Sons, 1956), pp. 160-2 (also cited by Mr Justice Saini, Solicitor General v. Trudi Warner [April 2024], §18).

[33] The case of the Shell Six is perhaps especially pertinent to our concerns here, and it’s worth citing the evidence recently given to Parliament by one of the defendants, the historian David Lambert FRSA: “In April 2021 I was one of six people found not guilty of criminal damage by a jury at Southwark Crown Court. In April 2019 as part of the Extinction Rebellion protests, we had broken windows and spilt fake oil over the front of the Shell building on the South Bank, and sprayed messages on the wall about Shell’s responsibilities for the climate crisis: Shell Knew, Shell Lies, Shell Kills.

Our aim was to cause damage of sufficient value to trigger a jury-trial in the Crown Court rather than just an appearance before magistrates. We wanted to test our action with ordinary people unmediated by a hostile press. In order to make our defence directly to our peers on the jury, we also dispensed with lawyers and represented ourselves.

At the trial, we offered no dispute about what we had done, of which there was plentiful evidence, but we were able, briefly, to explain why we had done it. As we spoke to the jury, they were able to look at and listen directly to us. And in our closing speeches, we were able to share with the jurors not only our fears for the future, but also our uncertainty and our gratitude to be sharing with them the dilemma of what to do in an era of unprecedented climate change and biodiversity collapse. The upshot was that after a two-week trial, the jury delivered a not guilty verdict.

We were lucky – most of what we were allowed to say to the jury in 2021 has since been ruled inadmissible in a sequence of protest trials overseen by judges more intolerant than ours. Increasingly draconian legislation, designed to silence peaceful protest, has also raised the stakes considerably. […]

Most of us will never find ourselves having to make our case to a jury of our peers. But we all have an interest in defending the right of jurors to hear ‘the whole truth’ not just a judge’s selection, and their right to deliver a verdict based not just on the law but on the evidence and crucially, their conscience. Juries may be imperfect but so are judges and so are Home Secretaries. As I said in my trial, ‘I had not appreciated what a “jury of your peers” really means until you all walked in here, and I have to say that I am glad that a verdict on what we did is entrusted to you. You are our community, and I am glad of it.’”

[34] “The principle of jury equity is well-established in our common law,” judge Saini continued. “It is also recognised across the common law world. I refer, for example, the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in Krieger v The Queen (2006) SCR 501; the decision of the Supreme Court of New Zealand in L v The Queen [2006] NZSC 18; and, in the United States Supreme Court, to the decision in Sparf v United States 156 US 51 (1895), as followed in United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America v United States 330 US 395 (1946). Its origins lie in Bushel’s Case (1670)…”

[35] J.R. Spencer, “Jury Equity – a Changing Climate?,” Archbold Review 9 (November 2023), pp.8-12, partially quoted by Joshua Rozenberg in the Law Gazette, 1 December 2023.

[36] As one legal analyst put it, in a discussion of judge Saini’s ruling: “Even allowing for the fact that Ms Warner appears to have been a relatively sympathetic defendant, with what many would regard as an attractive cause, it is not entirely easy to see how the judge accepted submissions from both parties that it would be unlawful for trial participants to inform jurors of the principle of jury equity, yet went on to hold that she had done nothing unlawful by doing so. It is also difficult to imagine what other motive Ms Warner might have had for acting as she did, if not to encourage jurors to acquit climate change activists, regardless of judicial directions and the evidence heard in court” (Rory Mulchrone, “HM Solicitor General v Trudi Ann Warner: Climate Justice or a Contemnor’s Charter?,” Astraea Group, 2 May 2024), p. 4).

[37] As Defend Our Juries’ Tim Crosland was quick to point out, “Lord Walney’s report is being presented as ‘independent’. But that’s not true. That’s dishonest. Lord Walney failed to disclose he is in fact the Chair of Defence Purpose Coalition, a group which represents the interests of arms companies, such as Leonardo, which Palestine Action are exposing for facilitating mass loss of life in Gaza. He is also a paid adviser to the Purpose Business Coalition, which includes BP, whose vast profits are threatened by Just Stop Oil. So, his recommendations are not surprising, since they serve the vested corporate interests he represents. But it would be a shocking deception on the public for anyone to present those recommendations as ‘independent’.”

[38] Palestine Action, Walney continues, “has repeatedly targeted Elbit UK offices and factories, vandalising the premises, and bringing work and production for the UK Ministry of Defence to a halt. As well as breaking into these buildings, causing large amounts of criminal damage, and glorifying their vandalism online, activists have climbed onto factory roofs, chained themselves to the inside of the buildings, and blocked entrances to stop production from going ahead. […] There can be no doubt that Palestine Action is using illegal methods to attempt to close subsidiaries of a registered company operating lawfully in this country.”

Walney also notes, with concern, that “despite the severity of Palestine Action’s campaign against Elbit UK, there were several early instances of activists being acquitted at trial or discharged without trial. The first Palestine Activists taken to trial were acquitted of criminal damage charges by a magistrate’s court despite having admitted to locking on to gates and throwing red paint over an Elbit UK factory. According to Palestine Action, the judge ruled that a conviction would be disproportionate to the defendants’ right to protest, enshrined in law under Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention of Human Rights, protecting freedom of expression and assembly respectively, especially considering that their beliefs were genuinely held and were rooted in ‘important issues’, and they had chosen their location specifically. In another acquittal, the defendants argued that their action had been a proportional and reasonable response to a company they believe is guilty of war crimes in Gaza.”

Hence Walney’s conclusion: “In my view, it is essential for the upholding of the rule of law that trials of this nature are not politicised. The same is true of climate activism. Those who break the law as part of political protest must be met with the same response, no matter the cause on whose behalf they claim to be acting” (§3.162).

[39] Free the Filton 25, “Briefing on the Latest Developments in the Filton Case,” shared 20 May 2026. Declassified UK’s chief reporter John McEvoy has seen “documents that reveal how the UK government was considering the proscription of Palestine Action before the action in Filton. A Counter Terrorism Policing (CTP) report dated 27 June 2024, some five weeks before the incident, discusses a meeting with the CPS about ‘the resource implications for CTP’ if Palestine Action were ‘declared as a terrorist group’. The report contained a CTP threat matrix which identified four categories of ‘activism’. They ranged from ‘lawful activism’ to ‘terrorism’ as defined under the Terrorism Act. In the view of the activists’ lawyers, this timeline suggested the ‘terrorist connection’ was added to the Filton action to build a legal justification for proscribing the group as a whole.”

[40] It may not be irrelevant to mention, at this point, that before he was a judge, then-lawyer Jeremy Johnson repeatedly acted on behalf of MI5, MI6 and the Ministry of Defence. He represented the police in the Hillsborough case, for instance, and the government in the Grenfell fire case. Perhaps it’s not surprising that he has been granted to the highest security clearance to access sensitive government documents. Perhaps it’s also not surprising that a few weeks ago, immediately after he secured the Filton convictions in early May, judge Johnson was promoted to the role of Deputy Senior Presiding Judge of England and Wales. Whether he is the best choice for a suitably impartial judge, in the Filton case, is another question.

[41] Real Media has posted supremely helpful summaries and partial transcriptions of the first and second Filton trials, in too much detail to address here. At a minimum, however, a couple of striking facts warrant careful attention. It’s remarkable, for instance, that in a trial ostensibly about damage to property, no Elbit witnesses were called, and no inventory of damaged goods or weapons was produced. It’s remarkable too that, in a trial concerning the premises of one of the sophisticated weapons and surveillance firms on earth, the prosecution was unable to explain why crucial and perhaps decisive CCTV footage could not be found or shared.

[42] “There have been many reports circulating of atrocities being committed in Gaza,” added Menon, “including people being buried under the rubble and hospitals being bombed. This is some of the evidence you’ve heard, and it is all evidence in this case. You are entitled to take it into account and give it what weight you think it justifies. Indeed, you may think it would be wrong, even perverse, to ignore that evidence that you’ve heard about the killing and destruction that has been taking place in Gaza now for over two years.”

[43] Samuel Corner’s barrister Tom Wainwright was obliged to remain at his post, since in addition to the shared charge of criminal damage, Corner also had to answer the further charge of grievous bodily harm with intent.

[44] As Professor John Spencer explained in 2023, in an article cited by High Court judge Mr Justice Saini in his 2024 ruling on Trudi Warner’s case, “for defence counsel to […] tell the jury it can acquit the defendant in disregard of the judge’s directions on the law would be viewed as a breach of the bar’s code of conduct. So, a defendant who wishes to secure an acquittal by these means will have to conduct their defence in person” (J.R. Spencer, “Jury Equity – a Changing Climate?,” Archbold Review 9 (November 2023), partially quoted in the Law Gazette, 1 December 2023).

[45] Speaking on behalf of Sam Corner, who in addition to criminal damage faced the more serious charge of grievous bodily harm with intent, on 29 April his barrister Tom Wainwright explained that “we are here because in the circumstances as he believed them to be, with his senses impaired and acting on instinct [after being hit with PAVA spray], Sam Corner did what he honestly believed needed to be done in order to protect someone [i.e. his comrade and co-defendant Leona Kamio] who he thought was being seriously injured. […] ‘I was protecting her.’ Sam Corner’s words, right at the end of the events of 6th August 2024, the events that brought him here today, give you the clearest possible indication as to what his motivation, his sole purpose and his only intention was when he swung the sledgehammer that night, and that is really what this case is about. ‘I was protecting her.’ Four words which were barely mentioned and wholly unexplained in the prosecution speech” (my emphases).

[46] Partial video evidence shared during the trials, despite the gaps, gives a vivid sense of this brutality. Ellie Kamio was tasered twice, knocked to the ground and dragged screaming along the floor; the security guard “Angelo Volante struck Jordan Devlin on two separate occasions with a sledgehammer and threatened others with it too,” the activists were hit by the incapacitant PAVA spray, and so on.

[47] The first Filton jury refused to convict Samuel Corner of GBH in February 2026; on 5 May they found him guilty of GBH but crucially without intent. The closing speech of Corner’s barrister Tom Wainwright provides a detailed reconstruction of what happened that night, and the very substantial series of mitigating circumstances that might attenuate Corner’s responsibility for the blow he struck.

[48] Paddy Friend, email to the author, 2 June 2026.

[49] In what came to be known (if only for a few short years) as “Hoffman’s bargain,” in this 2006 ruling he observed, at §89, that suitably well-behaved protestors act “with a sense of proportion and do not cause excessive damage or inconvenience. And they vouch the sincerity of their beliefs by accepting the penalties imposed by the law. The police and prosecutors, on the other hand, behave with restraint and the magistrates impose sentences which take the conscientious motives of the protesters into account.”

[50] Norrie, Crime, Reason and History, pp.56-7; I’m grateful to Paddy Friend for sharing this reference.

[51] Paddy Friend, ‘Jury Nullification as Minor Abolition,’ p. 12.

Feature image: Palestine Action activists Jordan Devlin, Charlotte Head, Zoe Rogers, Samuel Corner, Leona Kamio and Fatema Zainab Rajwani, known as the “Filton 6”, pose for the camera the night before they smashed up an Elbit arms factory in August 2024 (Filton 24 Defence Committee). Courtesy of The Electronic Intifada.

Peter Hallward