Dutch human rights activist, Olax Outis had no “lawful defence” and was stopped from give a closing speech – but was acquitted by the jury in a verdict seen as a snub to a system complicit in Genocide.
This garbage article doesn’t mention what he was charged with. After a search, turns out he was charged with criminal damage, and his main defence seems to be that he used washable paint so didn’t damage anything. Nonetheless the prosecution claim it cost £7000 to clean off.
I think people unquestioningly celebrating his acquittal need to think more carefully about it. If he’d just sprayed a shitty tag on a major statue or public building, presumably you’d all think that was wrong and would deserve some punishment, even if small. Even if the paint were washable, if it cost a lot to clean. But if it’s the content of the message that determines legality, as judged subjectively by a jury, we’re going to have some dark acquittals in the future. The fact that a jury happens to agree with the message is not a good way of judging guilt and innocence. The principle of rule of law is that the law takes a certain amount of blindness to things, to prevent it being abused.
EDIT: If you’re still going to reply please at least demonstrate that you have done that thinking. So far only one person who has replied in this thread has done so, which is a waste of everyone’s time and quite annoying.
No doubt the sentencing of the Palestine Action activists influenced the outcome here. In that case the jury convicted them of criminal damage and the judge used that to sentence them as terrorists. Pulling a bait and switch like that has consequences. The intended consequence was to intimidate protesters into silence. The actual consequence was to destroy confidence in the legal process. This jury knew that any guilty verdict would give the judge free rein to do the same trick, and they knew what an injustice that would be. The jury did the right thing, given that they were acting within a broken system.
The people have spoken, Javert, and that’s how the law works.
Killing factory owners is how we got the eight hour work day. Progress is not made by doing as you are told. Sometimes (most of the time) the system is wrong and breaking a part of it is what fixes that part of it. Governments should be for the people, and the people have spoken.
The article does point out that the victim had been imprisoned for 6 months at that point. That’s already disproportionate punishment for writing a slogan with washable paint on the likeness of some genocidal cunt. Would he have been put through that if he’d written some other message? I doubt it.
Do you think that if a government made a law criminalizing having brown skin that a jury has a moral imperative to find brown people guilty?
I think the point of a jury is to apply justice to the legal system, and in fact their moral imperative is to acquit people who face unjust applications of the law or are victims of government oppression.
While I get your concern, that sort of undermines having a jury of your peers. If we’re solely judging by what the law says, why not just have a group of judges decide? Or voted-for representatives?
It being your peers is a counter balance to the power of bad laws being passed and providing the public a way to push back (when things are incorrect).
While you simultaneously (and fairly) worry about the will of the majority being able to run roughshod, I’d say that ability in the context of a jury is decently limited so the ability for a jury to rule this way provides a sufficient check on possible bad laws.
There are lots of good reasons for jury trials, I think the biggest one is that you get a slice of the population rather than whatever your population of judges happens to be. What you’re talking about amounts to jury nullification, which is a fact of jury trials but I don’t think many people would say is the purpose of them. The textbook distinction is that the judge interprets the law, and the jury decides facts as needed under that interpretation.
I think it would be good to think what might happen if someone were up in court for having spray-painted “deport all immigrants”, or a similar far-right slogan. (Perhaps more offensive? Perhaps more aggressive? You can imagine many.)
Such a person ought to be treated the same in the eyes of the law as anyone else performing the same actions - as long as his slogans don’t meet the threshold of specific hate crimes, he’d just be someone with a strongly held belief that his political leaders needed to change course. If a jury of his peers happened to be all Reform voters, that should not acquit him, in my opinion.
No, I definitely get what you mean; it makes sense.
I just…don’t know how you get around the fact that there’s nothing, really, to stop that. Theoretically, that’s why you have multiple jurors: as you said, to get a slice of the population (and, hopefully, offset or dampen any bias a homogeneous group would, otherwise, have). Having a properly diverse slice is, theoretically, the mechanism.
But – in addition to that – I think what you’re envisioning only fully and always works if we can assume that the laws are fair and that all those carrying out the law are working from good faith. Judges, being more knowledgeable of the law, make sense to interpret the law but I’ve definitely seen some absurdly biased reading of particular laws, as well; what do we do, then, as recourse if a blatant mistreatment of justice is occurring but, well, that’s what the law’s been interpreted as and, as the system exists, that’s what we’re supposed to take on its face? (I don’t know that it really fits since, in the end, it was the judge who made the decision and you’ve already mentioned they should be the ones to interpret but I’ve seen lawyers argue that those later found innocent should remain sentenced because they didn’t prove said innocence during their trial so, based on the procedure/practice of things, their innocence should be dismissed/ignored: https://www.injusticewatch.org/archive/2020/missouri-attorney-general-fights-exonerations/)
I think, ultimately, I’m less worried about a sense that it sets any kind of precedent for the law being interpreted on whim is the fact that it was a slice of the population. Generally, you’ll probably have someone who may want to more closely hew what the law is. The fact that the whole jury was in agreement might point to an issue with something and allow the people to otherwise push back on how their government is serving them. But I’d suspect outcomes like this to be outliers, rather than the norm.
(this is only personal – and, therefore, incidental to our conversation – but having seen the lack of easy recourse for people to put a check on their government over my time of being alive has made me more sympathetic to some avenues to overturn judges’ interpretation of the law, in some manner; I am slightly envious of the UK’s parliamentary sovereignty allowing to push back on the courts in a way that the U. S.'s congress simply cannot)
He actually covers it in the closing arguments (the definition of protest law). I am not familiar with UK law, but it shouldn’t be hard to double check
Tip: protest law does not make many generally illegal things legal if you were protesting. It was a rhetorical question because the person above was implying it would do something it doesn’t.
I’m not sure you understand what the law is… The law is not a book of rules, it does not exist independently from its creators, it is the will of the people. If the people find someone not guilty, they’re not guilty. The law was invented by people and only exists to be an extension of the will of the people.
If ten people from a representative section of the population thinks someone is guilty or not guilty, that is the law. It doesn’t matter whether they did something or not, what they are deciding is whether they should be punished for it or not. That’s why there is a jury in the first place, otherwise you’d have a system based on accuracy, not on argument.
I understand that what you’re talking about could be understood to be “the law” but it’s not what I’m talking about when I use the word, and I don’t think it’s what most people understand by the word.
But OK, when you say “the law” you mean “what people get convicted for.” I’m saying this person probably should have been convicted, but you haven’t even said whether you agree, because picking a different definition for a word doesn’t help decide what should or should not happen.
The law is the will of the people so if they weren’t convicted they shouldn’t be. The law does not exist independently of humans, because it is an imaginary concept we made up.
So the law is just an excuse for us to punish the people we want to punish and not punish the people we don’t want to. All abstract concepts disappear when there are no more humans, so they are not things onto themselves.
Yes, because our system isn’t designed for justice. The police doesn’t try to find the truth, they just try to find someone to charge. The defender doesn’t try to find the truth, but to escape conviction for his client, likewise with the prosecutor. The judge is there to follow the letter of the law as well as possible, there is nobody that cares about justice.
The very idea that you need a prosecutor and a defender makes no sense if you think about it. At sociey that wanted justice would just have a bunch of independant experts colaborate to find the truth and sentence based on that.
The idea that the process of justice must be carried out like a competition in which both sides are trying to trip each other up and trying to win at any cost through manipulation and omission with no regards to truth or justice means that the system has no interest in either.
Edgy. There are standard arguments for why an adversarial legal system tends to achieve good outcomes. I’m not really interested in digging up standard arguments though so I guess we’ll leave it here.
Sure, there are many arguments for many bad ideas, but the statistics don’t lie. A hostile police force, an adversarial legal system, only leads to miscarriages of justice.
It’s just an extension of capitalism; if you can get away with it your actions are legitimized regardless of what you did. It’s the paradigm of the End justifying the means.
So pur system is designed for miscarriage of justice and so as such cannot be said to result in miscarriages of justice because we do not care about justice in the first place.
This garbage article doesn’t mention what he was charged with. After a search, turns out he was charged with criminal damage, and his main defence seems to be that he used washable paint so didn’t damage anything. Nonetheless the prosecution claim it cost £7000 to clean off.
I think people unquestioningly celebrating his acquittal need to think more carefully about it. If he’d just sprayed a shitty tag on a major statue or public building, presumably you’d all think that was wrong and would deserve some punishment, even if small. Even if the paint were washable, if it cost a lot to clean. But if it’s the content of the message that determines legality, as judged subjectively by a jury, we’re going to have some dark acquittals in the future. The fact that a jury happens to agree with the message is not a good way of judging guilt and innocence. The principle of rule of law is that the law takes a certain amount of blindness to things, to prevent it being abused.
EDIT: If you’re still going to reply please at least demonstrate that you have done that thinking. So far only one person who has replied in this thread has done so, which is a waste of everyone’s time and quite annoying.
No doubt the sentencing of the Palestine Action activists influenced the outcome here. In that case the jury convicted them of criminal damage and the judge used that to sentence them as terrorists. Pulling a bait and switch like that has consequences. The intended consequence was to intimidate protesters into silence. The actual consequence was to destroy confidence in the legal process. This jury knew that any guilty verdict would give the judge free rein to do the same trick, and they knew what an injustice that would be. The jury did the right thing, given that they were acting within a broken system.
The people have spoken, Javert, and that’s how the law works.
Killing factory owners is how we got the eight hour work day. Progress is not made by doing as you are told. Sometimes (most of the time) the system is wrong and breaking a part of it is what fixes that part of it. Governments should be for the people, and the people have spoken.
The article does point out that the victim had been imprisoned for 6 months at that point. That’s already disproportionate punishment for writing a slogan with washable paint on the likeness of some genocidal cunt. Would he have been put through that if he’d written some other message? I doubt it.
Do you think that if a government made a law criminalizing having brown skin that a jury has a moral imperative to find brown people guilty?
I think the point of a jury is to apply justice to the legal system, and in fact their moral imperative is to acquit people who face unjust applications of the law or are victims of government oppression.
While I get your concern, that sort of undermines having a jury of your peers. If we’re solely judging by what the law says, why not just have a group of judges decide? Or voted-for representatives?
It being your peers is a counter balance to the power of bad laws being passed and providing the public a way to push back (when things are incorrect).
While you simultaneously (and fairly) worry about the will of the majority being able to run roughshod, I’d say that ability in the context of a jury is decently limited so the ability for a jury to rule this way provides a sufficient check on possible bad laws.
There are lots of good reasons for jury trials, I think the biggest one is that you get a slice of the population rather than whatever your population of judges happens to be. What you’re talking about amounts to jury nullification, which is a fact of jury trials but I don’t think many people would say is the purpose of them. The textbook distinction is that the judge interprets the law, and the jury decides facts as needed under that interpretation.
I think it would be good to think what might happen if someone were up in court for having spray-painted “deport all immigrants”, or a similar far-right slogan. (Perhaps more offensive? Perhaps more aggressive? You can imagine many.)
Such a person ought to be treated the same in the eyes of the law as anyone else performing the same actions - as long as his slogans don’t meet the threshold of specific hate crimes, he’d just be someone with a strongly held belief that his political leaders needed to change course. If a jury of his peers happened to be all Reform voters, that should not acquit him, in my opinion.
No, I definitely get what you mean; it makes sense.
I just…don’t know how you get around the fact that there’s nothing, really, to stop that. Theoretically, that’s why you have multiple jurors: as you said, to get a slice of the population (and, hopefully, offset or dampen any bias a homogeneous group would, otherwise, have). Having a properly diverse slice is, theoretically, the mechanism.
But – in addition to that – I think what you’re envisioning only fully and always works if we can assume that the laws are fair and that all those carrying out the law are working from good faith. Judges, being more knowledgeable of the law, make sense to interpret the law but I’ve definitely seen some absurdly biased reading of particular laws, as well; what do we do, then, as recourse if a blatant mistreatment of justice is occurring but, well, that’s what the law’s been interpreted as and, as the system exists, that’s what we’re supposed to take on its face? (I don’t know that it really fits since, in the end, it was the judge who made the decision and you’ve already mentioned they should be the ones to interpret but I’ve seen lawyers argue that those later found innocent should remain sentenced because they didn’t prove said innocence during their trial so, based on the procedure/practice of things, their innocence should be dismissed/ignored: https://www.injusticewatch.org/archive/2020/missouri-attorney-general-fights-exonerations/)
I think, ultimately, I’m less worried about a sense that it sets any kind of precedent for the law being interpreted on whim is the fact that it was a slice of the population. Generally, you’ll probably have someone who may want to more closely hew what the law is. The fact that the whole jury was in agreement might point to an issue with something and allow the people to otherwise push back on how their government is serving them. But I’d suspect outcomes like this to be outliers, rather than the norm.
(this is only personal – and, therefore, incidental to our conversation – but having seen the lack of easy recourse for people to put a check on their government over my time of being alive has made me more sympathetic to some avenues to overturn judges’ interpretation of the law, in some manner; I am slightly envious of the UK’s parliamentary sovereignty allowing to push back on the courts in a way that the U. S.'s congress simply cannot)
Mm thanks for this
Yes that is what protest law is. You are not understanding free speech and the right to protest lol.
free speech and right to protest aren’t the same in the UK as in the US.
Free speech does not protect damaging property anyway.
I agree with the guy’s message, but all of y’all are having a hard time understanding how the legal system is supposed to work.
Justice is supposed to be blind and proceed according to the law.
If you don’t like the law, that’s where, you, as a citizen, and through your legislature, amend/create those laws.
That is why it is important to watchdog your legislators. They are the ones that are allowing this shit to happen in the first place.
Am I glad he was aquiited, absolutely. But the judge wasn’t wrong either.
Man, I love that fucking line, “Never again is now”.
What is “protest law” in the UK? Where on the world does free speech allow spraying slogans on public buildings?
He actually covers it in the closing arguments (the definition of protest law). I am not familiar with UK law, but it shouldn’t be hard to double check
Tip: protest law does not make many generally illegal things legal if you were protesting. It was a rhetorical question because the person above was implying it would do something it doesn’t.
It kinda does though. There is a thing called Civil Disobedience and that is protected actually.
Protected by which law(s) in the UK? Or can you give an example of case law?
I’m not sure you understand what the law is… The law is not a book of rules, it does not exist independently from its creators, it is the will of the people. If the people find someone not guilty, they’re not guilty. The law was invented by people and only exists to be an extension of the will of the people.
If ten people from a representative section of the population thinks someone is guilty or not guilty, that is the law. It doesn’t matter whether they did something or not, what they are deciding is whether they should be punished for it or not. That’s why there is a jury in the first place, otherwise you’d have a system based on accuracy, not on argument.
I understand that what you’re talking about could be understood to be “the law” but it’s not what I’m talking about when I use the word, and I don’t think it’s what most people understand by the word.
But OK, when you say “the law” you mean “what people get convicted for.” I’m saying this person probably should have been convicted, but you haven’t even said whether you agree, because picking a different definition for a word doesn’t help decide what should or should not happen.
The law is the will of the people so if they weren’t convicted they shouldn’t be. The law does not exist independently of humans, because it is an imaginary concept we made up.
So the law is just an excuse for us to punish the people we want to punish and not punish the people we don’t want to. All abstract concepts disappear when there are no more humans, so they are not things onto themselves.
Seems to be what you’re saying
Yes, because our system isn’t designed for justice. The police doesn’t try to find the truth, they just try to find someone to charge. The defender doesn’t try to find the truth, but to escape conviction for his client, likewise with the prosecutor. The judge is there to follow the letter of the law as well as possible, there is nobody that cares about justice.
The very idea that you need a prosecutor and a defender makes no sense if you think about it. At sociey that wanted justice would just have a bunch of independant experts colaborate to find the truth and sentence based on that.
The idea that the process of justice must be carried out like a competition in which both sides are trying to trip each other up and trying to win at any cost through manipulation and omission with no regards to truth or justice means that the system has no interest in either.
Edgy. There are standard arguments for why an adversarial legal system tends to achieve good outcomes. I’m not really interested in digging up standard arguments though so I guess we’ll leave it here.
Sure, there are many arguments for many bad ideas, but the statistics don’t lie. A hostile police force, an adversarial legal system, only leads to miscarriages of justice.
It’s just an extension of capitalism; if you can get away with it your actions are legitimized regardless of what you did. It’s the paradigm of the End justifying the means.
So pur system is designed for miscarriage of justice and so as such cannot be said to result in miscarriages of justice because we do not care about justice in the first place.
You are not arguing in a way that will convince me. Please leave me alone if that’s the only way you know how.
I suppose jury could say it’s an improvement, not a damage. Or that 7k is ridiculous and hence throw out the case.