Independent UK: Cleared: Jury decides that threat of global warming justifies breaking the law

[marmar]

Cleared: Jury decides that threat of global warming justifies breaking the law

By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
Thursday, 11 September 2008


The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage.

Jurors accepted defence arguments that the six had a "lawful excuse" to damage property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even greater damage caused by climate change. The defence of "lawful excuse" under the Criminal Damage Act 1971 allows damage to be caused to property to prevent even greater damage – such as breaking down the door of a burning house to tackle a fire.

The not-guilty verdict, delivered after two days and greeted with cheers in the courtroom, raises the stakes for the most pressing issue on Britain's green agenda and could encourage further direct action.

Kingsnorth was the centre for mass protests by climate camp activists last month. Last year, three protesters managed to paint Gordon Brown's name on the plant's chimney. Their handi-work cost £35,000 to remove.

The plan to build a successor to the power station is likely to be the first of a new generation of coal-fired plants. As coal produces more of the carbon emissions causing climate change than any other fuel, campaigners claim that a new station would be a disastrous setback in the battle against global warming, and send out a negative signal to the rest of the world about how serious Britain really is about tackling the climate threat. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/cleared-jury-decides-that-threat-of-global-warming-justifies-breaking-the-law-925561.html

[Sanity Claws]

1. Wow

Sounds like the jurors are sick of their government not taking the lead on curbing global warming.
It really sounds revolutionary.

[Howzit]

2. What is the definition of vigilantism? If breaking the law is sometimes OK, aren't you inviting

others to break the laws of their choosing with similar justification?

[bananas]

3. It's not breaking the law, what they did was completely legal.

This happened with Amy Carter a long time ago, afterwards Mass. changed their laws so it was no longer legal.

"Amy Carter later became known for her political activism, participating in a number of sit-ins and protests during the 1980s and early 1990s, aimed at changing U.S. foreign policy towards South Africa and Central America. Along with activist Abbie Hoffman and 13 others, she was arrested during a 1987 demonstration at the University of Massachusetts for protesting CIA recruitment there. She was acquitted of all charges in a well-publicized trial in Northampton, Massachusetts. Attorney Leonard Weinglass, who defended Abbie Hoffman in the Chicago Seven trial in the 1960s, utilized the necessity defense, successfully arguing that CIA involvement in Central America and other hotspots were equivalent to trespassing in a burning building.<4> This occurred during Amy's sophomore year at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Later, she left Brown due to unrelated and unpublicized issues."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Carter

[Howzit]

5. Causing more than £35,000 worth of damage is completely legal?

Protesting is fine, but if you start to deliberately damage property, the next step is for one side or the other to start damaging people.

You may applaud the Earth Liberation Front for burning Humvees, but when they set fire to a new housing development in SoCal a few years back, that made them laughable: The wood from those trees had been grown for timber (and soaked up CO2). By burning the houses down, more trees were sacrificed to replace the lumber.

I don't care what your motivation is; if you act in a violent manner you place yourself at risk of more desperate acts in response. Such acts may end up costing lives.

[bananas]

6. Yes, it's completely legal. nt

[Nihil]

7. Nice sideswipe by the way ...

> ... but when they (ELF) set fire to a new housing development
> in SoCal a few years back ...

Not proven, not claimed, just alleged by the developer who, by sheer
coincidence, wasn't able to sell them and so was getting in deep
financial sh*t. Also coincidentally, an insurance claim would pay
back most of his debts. Wasn't it a nice coincidence that an
anonymous caller claimed that ELF had committed arson on those
unwanted millstones around the innocent developer's neck?

One final BTW: Greenpeace are not ELF so no more red herrings please?

[tom_paine]

15. Yep. Bushies remind me of the movie Good Fellas.

Remember when the trucker goes into the diner, winking at the two gangsters waiting in the parking lot to steal it?

Then, when the trucker buys his lunch and sees the truck "shockingly" gone, he comes back in and cries, "Give me a phone. Do you believe that? Two N-Words just stole my truck?"

This might well be the same kind of thing, which happens, I am almost certain, far FAR more often than people think.

[dipsydoodle]

8. I'da thunk Mass. laws would be over ridden by

your equivalent of the defence of "necessity".

Go here and then click on 2.3 United States : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessity#United_States

The use of a defence of necessity was thought to be the background to our Crown Prosecution Services deciding not to proceed with charges against the girl at GCHQ who leaked information <on the Iraq situation ?>. I used the expresion situation because it isn't a war : it's an occupation. She did it for the greater good by attempting to reduce a greater evil.

[bananas]

9. Katharine Gun

From wikipedia:

"The case came to court on February 25, 2004. Within half an hour the case was dropped because the prosecution declined to offer evidence. The reasons for the prosecution dropping the case are unclear. The day before the trial Gun's defence team had asked the government for any records of advice about the legality of the war that it had received during the run-up to the war. A full trial might have exposed any such documents to public scrutiny as the defence were expected to argue that trying to stop an illegal act (that of an illegal war of aggression) trumped Gun's obligations under the Official Secrets Act. Speculation was rife in the media that the prosecution service had bowed to political pressure to drop the case so that any such documents would remain secret. However a Government spokesman said that the decision to drop the case had been made before the defence's demands had been submitted. (The Guardian newspaper had reported plans to drop the case the previous week.) On the day of the court case Gun was quoted as saying:

"I'm just baffled that in the 21st century we as human beings are still dropping bombs on each other as a means to resolve issues."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharine_Gun

[dipsydoodle]

12. Coo !

You did really well finding that. I'm here and it defeated me trying to find her name - I just recalled the issue. As far as I'm aware the only issue against which necessity definately cannot be used here as a defence is murder as "there is no greater crime" according to our Law Lords.

[bananas]

10. Here's a case from this year, in Texas

I posted it another thread:
"HIV-Positive Man Wins Acquittal In Texas' First Cannabis Medical Necessity Defense"
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=3980344&mesg_id=3981432

[Nihil]

4. There were no injuries, no guns, no violence and no law broken.

> The defence of "lawful excuse" under the Criminal Damage Act 1971
> allows damage to be caused to property to prevent even greater damage

i.e., it was adjudged to be a legal protest when taken against the
ongoing and (largely) unchallenged dangerous behaviour of the fossil-fuel
power station.

Save the "vigilantism" hype for somewhere else. :eyes:

[GliderGuider]

11. Heaven forfend we should arrogate to ourselves the right to decide

whether a life and death issue is worth damaging some property over.

Oh, they broke a LAW? Shock! Horror! Who do you thinks makes those laws, and why?

"Political Will, Political Won't"

Guardian Institutions

As always happens with hierarchies, power flows uphill. Along with it go the perquisites of power, the most important being the right to higher levels of material abundance than those lower in the pecking order. To ensure that this comfortable situation is maintained, part of the accumulated social power is used to protect the situation. This is done by strongly defending the three preconditions set out above. The people to whom this power flowed quickly realized that the status quo is most easily maintained if the rest of the community sees this situation as the only possible way life can work, and any suggestions to the contrary are the result of either some nefarious agenda or outright insanity.

Over time an interlocking system of guardian institutions grew up to protect and defend the three key ideas of ownership, growth and hierarchy:

• Economic and financial institutions cooperate with business and industry to set the value of work and control the money supply (thereby controlling access to food). In this role it doesn't make any difference whether an economy is capitalist, socialist or communist. The core beliefs it guards are always the same: ownership and growth.
  
• Educational institutions teach successive generations how the system works, giving them the tools to integrate into it and manipulate it, while at the same time training them to see this as the only possible way the world can work.
  
• Communications media reinforce this message by enlisting people in the growth paradigm. They do this both through overt messages like advertising and covert messages embedded in the story lines of entertainment.
  
• Religious institutions (as distinct from the religions they purport to enshrine) are primarily normative social structures. Many incorporate an overt message that we should be content with things as they are. There are often injunctions against questioning authority, as all authority is seen to devolve from the supernatural – just as it did for the shamans of the early agricultural era.
  
• Legal institutions enforce the norms of ownership and hierarchy in ways too numerous to count. These range from the protection of privilege (one law for the rich, one for the poor) to the preferential defense of property rights over human rights.
  
• Political institutions sit at the tip of the pyramid. Political institutions encode, enshrine and manage the application of social power. Politics is the institution that legitimizes all the others. Because of its unique ability to make laws and its access to legalized violence to defend those laws, politics is the fullest expression of the power hierarchy of modern civilization.

Let's hear it for direct action -- even pallid, pusillanimous expressions of it as we saw here. It's time people reclaimed their rights to thought and deed.

[SCBeeland]

13. Does the UK not want an economy?

This decision is absolute lunacy.

[GliderGuider]

14. How do you figure that?

:shrug: