QUICK PAGE LINKS TO EACH SPEECH BELOW:
Tom Wainwright on behalf of Samuel Corner
Mira Hammad on behalf of Leona Kamio
Catherine Oborne on behalf of Fatema Zainab Rajwani
Audrey Mogan on behalf of Zoe Rogers
Andrew Morris on behalf of Jordan Devlin
Thursday January 8th
Rajiv Menon KC on behalf of defendant Charlotte Head
Great changes come about because of the extraordinary courage and personal sacrifice of ordinary people. The anthropologist Margaret Mead put it well when she said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful community citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” An example close to home of extraordinary courage and personal sacrifice is the suffragettes, who at the beginning of the 20th century waged a militant campaign to secure the vote for women in Britain. Their slogan was “deeds, not words.” They 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.
Today, we celebrate the suffragettes for their heroism and for securing the vote for women. There are memorials to the suffragettes in public places around the country. They are part of the GCSE history curriculum. Recently, the London Overground Line between Gospel Oak and Barking was renamed the Suffragette Line. Members of Parliament and the mainstream press accused them of taking the law into their own hands, denouncing them as extremists and terrorists, aggressive and violent.
They were remarkable women from all walks of life, united in their hope, their despair, their defiance, and their dedication. Charlotte Head is also a remarkable woman. And I say that without any reservation. This is not something that lawyers defending in criminal trials often say about their clients.
I spent some time when she was giving evidence on her story, her journey and her principles – how she became politicised – it is fundamental to assessing her character, the credibility of her account, her conduct during the action, and her state of mind at critical times.
Mr Menon spent some time reminding the jury of Charlotte’s upbringing, her selfless volunteering for years in Calais, her work with victims of domestic abuse in London, and after October 2023, how she became involved with the campaign on Hackney Council to divest from the arms trade and Israel. We covered that in our report of Day Ten of the trial which you can find here, which also charts her route into Palestine Action through a non-violent direct action training day, and her decision to join a ‘high level arrestable action’.
She told the jury about a specific video of a father in Gaza holding his young child, who had been decapitated by an Israeli bomb. She told Ms Heer she did not believe she was going to be committing any crime when she indicated she might be prepared to join a high-level arrestable action, because she believed that what she was doing was going to be lawful.
Mr Menon said Ms Heer had been unfair characterising Ms Head as “a woman in a hurry”, because she had actually been trying to effect real change within the system for years.
The genocide was continuing, and as a country, we were complicit by allowing the likes of Elbit Systems to operate freely here, creating their weapons for use in Gaza. If anything, Charlotte had been incredibly patient before she indicated she might be prepared, this is at the training event, to volunteer for an action that would result in her getting arrested.
Mr Menon also said Ms Heer was wrong to dismiss the claim that activists worked on a ‘need to know’ basis and to suggest Charlotte was an organiser. Ms Head had offered to buy the van and drive because of her years of experience in Calais.
Charlotte stayed at the Airbnb in Bristol, where she met her co-defendants in the red team and others involved in the action. You know about the various discussions, first on Signal and then at the Airbnb, that Charlotte, the rest of the red team, and occasionally some of the organisers had about the action and about the red lines of the action. You know that the red team were told by the organisers that they would have plenty of time to damage property if they managed to get into the factory. The security guards would stay out and the police would take some time to arrive. We now know, of course, that the organisers got that terribly wrong. But that’s not the fault of the red team, given their inexperience. Being naïve does not make you guilty of a criminal offence. Please bear that in mind. And finally you know that Charlotte did not anticipate being remanded in custody and being denied bail. She had only taken a week off work and had a flat with all her possessions in them in Hackney. I’ve spent some time on this because your ultimate assessment of her as a person will inevitably be central to the factual conclusions you reach and the verdicts you return.
Mr Menon told the jury they’d be retiring next week to consider a verdict and will have heard several other speeches and the judge’s summary by then, so reminded them it was OK to make notes if it helped. He also said he wouldn’t be playing footage yet again, but they would be able to watch that in the jury room as much as they needed. He also would only be taking them to a few of the documents from their bundle. But first he wanted to cover five general points:
- Palestine and Israel’s attack on Gaza
- Palestine Action
- Elbit Systems
- The action against the Elbit factory in Filton
- The missing CCTV footage from inside the Elbit factory at Filton
1 Palestine and Israel’s attack on Gaza
When the trial began, the judge warned you that while you were entitled to your views on what he called the war in Gaza, they were irrelevant to this case. This was a fair point to make at this stage of the case.
Prejudging matters based on your pre-existing views, when you had yet to hear any evidence, would have been wrong and contrary to your affirmations. But the position now is different. You’ve heard evidence about Israel’s attack on Gaza, and about Palestine more generally, from those defendants who have given evidence. And none of that evidence by the defendants has been challenged or contradicted by the prosecution. None of it.
You’ve heard evidence that there’s a genocide taking place in Gaza, that Israel was founded on top of Palestinian land, that Britain played a key role in this, that there have been wars in Israel and Palestine for years, that there is a settler colonial occupation of Palestinian land, that by the summer of 2024, some 40,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military in less than a year, and that a third of them were children. More children have been killed in Gaza than in the Ukraine war. There have been many reports circulating of atrocities being committed in Gaza, 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.
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? How can you assess that 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.
Given you are randomly selected members of the public, it is probably fair to assume that there is a broad range of views amongst you, and that some of you know more and some of you know less. You all know about the horrific events of the 7th of October 2023, when Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel from Gaza, killing some 1,200 people and taking a further 250 people as hostages. You all know that Israel has been retaliating ever since, killing tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, injuring hundreds of thousands more, destroying the majority of Gaza’s buildings and infrastructure, and creating one of the worst humanitarian crises of the 21st century. I mean, this is all common knowledge.
You need to take care not to allow undue emotion, and your particular views about what has been happening, to distort your assessment of the evidence. It’s important to remain objective, but you are not robots. And you cannot unknow what you already know. Nobody should ask you to do so.
The reason we celebrate trial by jury in this country, although sadly who knows for how much longer, is that there is no better system of criminal justice anywhere in the world than 12 randomly selected members of the public, like you, bringing their individual minds to a problem.
2 Palestine Action
The defendants have told you about Palestine Action. None of that evidence has been challenged by the prosecution and you can be sure they would have if there were lies or exaggeration.
Palestine Action was formed several years ago. It has garnered considerable popular support in this country. In August of last year, one defendant told you Palestine Action had over 200,000 followers on Instagram. It had, by August 2024, organised hundreds of actions, maybe 400. They’d involved direct action of various kinds – lock-ons, spraying paint, breaking windows, occupying rooftops, dismantling cameras, and entering premises without permission and damaging weapons and other property, like the Filton action. None of those actions involved unlawful violence on people, let alone serious unlawful violence. Those arrested for their involvement in actions had always been granted bail with one possible exception – someone who you were told had been remanded in custody for a short period of time, perhaps because of some previous convictions, and even that person was eventually granted bail.
You know Palestine Action’s primary target was an Israeli weapons company called Elbit Systems. None of this evidence is in dispute. And you may think it’s important evidence to bear in mind. But there’s an elephant in the room, so to speak. You also know, because it was all over the news at the time, and because His Lordship gave you a direction about it at the start of the trial, that the former Home Secretary proscribed Palestine Action in June of last year under our terrorism laws. It’s now a banned organisation, and it’s illegal to be a member or to express support for Palestine Action. His Lordship rightly directed you that you mustn’t hold it against these defendants. It’s completely irrelevant as far as any issue in the case is concerned.
I’m bringing it up again because it’s the sort of issue that can cause serious prejudice against the defendants. His Lordship and I have not seen eye to eye on everything during this trial. I hope that’s a fair comment to make. But on this matter, we are totally on the same page and in complete agreement. I anticipate the judge will repeat this direction when he sums up the case to you.
As well as the evidence from defendants about Palestine Action, you also have documents in your jury bundle, which you can read at your leisure. All I was going to say at this point was that—it was the obvious point— that there is nothing in any of those documents to suggest that Palestine Action advocates violence against people, or that the plan at Filton involved an intention to injure or incapacitate security guards with sledgehammers if the need arose.
But on Tuesday in her closing speech, Ms Heer said that although none of the documents explicitly refer to the use of violence or weapons against people, that doesn’t mean that there was no plan to use violence or weapons against people, “as Palestine Action would hardly have wanted the police or the general public to know that they were planning a violent act”.
What does that mean? Are you being invited by the prosecution to speculate that there was a plan to use violence or weapons against people, even though the planning documents on which the prosecution rely as a key plank of their case against the defendants say nothing of the kind?
This is not a game – the defendant’s lives and futures are at stake. The case is far too serious for anyone to be telling you that you can fairly and properly conclude from documents that do not speak about using violence or weapons against people that the plan, in fact, was to use violence and weapons against people. Please do not be led up the garden path about these documents.
3 Elbit Systems
When opening the prosecution case, Ms Heer described Elbit Systems as an “Israeli-linked defence company”. I’m not going to labour this point, but it’s a matter for you whether that is a fair and accurate description of Elbit, or something of a mischaracterisation. Either way, it wouldn’t have escaped your notice that on several occasions during the trial, if a question was asked about Elbit Systems or what the witness knew about Elbit Systems, His Lordship intervened and stopped it being asked.
The first time His Lordship intervened was when I was cross-examining the security guard, Mr Shaw. I asked him what I thought was a pretty innocuous, uncontroversial question. A yes/no question. I asked him whether he knew Elbit was Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer. The judge intervened and said if I wanted to ask a question along these lines we’d need to have a discussion about it. I responded in your presence that it was just one question. The judge asked me to move on, and I did.
His Lordship also intervened during Charlotte’s evidence. When I was asking her questions, Charlotte was telling you about the Palestine Action training event she had attended and what she was told about Elbit Systems. When His Lordship intervened again, I said in the jury’s presence that I was asking Charlotte about the company targeted in this case, which was directly relevant to her state of mind, and that this was a proper area for me to ask her about.
The jury were asked to leave court for a few minutes.
There’s nothing unusual that when there’s a dispute between the parties at a criminal trial, or between one party and the trial judge, juries are often asked to leave court for those matters to be discussed in their absence. When you returned to court, I moved on to a different topic. In other words, Charlotte was not allowed to give any further evidence about what was said about Elbit at the Palestine Action Training event, or about what she knew about Elbit more generally.
His Lordship also intervened during the evidence of Zoe Rogers when her barrister Ms Mogan was asking her questions. Zoe was giving evidence about how she’d read about Palestine Action on their website and on Instagram and how this had led her to Elbit’s website. Before Ms Mogan could ask Zoe about what she had read on that website, His Lordship stopped her saying something like, “This is an area outside what I have ruled is relevant – if you want to pursue this, we will have to argue it. What Ms Rogers knew about Elbit has been adequately covered”.
In your presence, Ms Mogan tried to reason with His Lordship. She said that Zoe should be allowed to give her account of what she’d learned from Elbit’s website. His Lordship said that Ms. Rogers had already given a sufficient account and so Ms Mogan had no choice but to move on, which she did.
So that, in summary, is the position. His Lordship has restricted what the defendants have been allowed to tell you they knew about Elbit and what they knew about Elbit’s role in the Israeli attack on Gaza. Consequently, you do not know everything that the defendants knew about Elbit before each of them individually decided to take that major step of getting involved in the action against the factory in Filton.
For the avoidance of any doubt, before I’m criticised, our system does allow trial judges to make rulings as to what evidence is relevant and what evidence is not. If a judge decides that certain evidence should not be given on the grounds that it is not relevant to any issue in the case, then that judge is entitled to exclude such evidence, however strange it might seem, however much the defendants or their lawyers might object.
But the consequence of such a judicial approach to the evidence in this case is that you’ve only heard very limited evidence about Elbit, and how what the defendants knew about Elbit influenced their decision-making – you’ve been prevented from hearing any more. Having said all of that – and I hope I’ve summarised it fairly – the little you have been permitted to hear from several of the defendants about Elbit is nevertheless instructive.
You’ve heard that Elbit is Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, that Elbit produces 85% of the weapons used by the Israeli military, that Elbit produces drones, munitions, and battle simulators. You’ve heard that the weapons Elbit was making were being sent to Israel, and that Elbit tests those weapons on Palestinians. That Elbit was proud about producing 85 percent of Israel’s combat drones, that Elbit’s CEO gave a talk during which he boasted that war was good for business, and that Elbit’s employees have stated publicly that they are proud to be the backbone of the Israeli military. Finally, that the Filton factory was Elbit’s newest facility in the U.K. and was opened by the Israeli ambassador.
So this is all important evidence in the case. And what the defendants told you about Elbit are not just their beliefs. They are facts, and none of them were disputed by the prosecution. Not one of them.
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. There’s no evidence to contradict any of it.
Only the jury can decide what weight to give the evidence you’ve heard about Elbit, or any other evidence. You may think that it’s incredibly important evidence that you’ve heard when you assess the character of the defendants, the credibility of their accounts, their conduct during the action, and their state of mind at critical times during the chronology of events that culminated in that action. 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.
How can you reach true verdicts according to the evidence if you ignore the unchallenged, uncontradicted evidence you’ve heard about this dreadful company?
4 The action against the factory at Filton (what went wrong?)
At the start of the trial Ms. Heer told you that the action was meticulously organised, with a step-by-step action plan, and everyone taking part knew what was required of them. She told you there was a black team of ‘coverts’ who were to remain outside the facility and overwhelm the security guards before fleeing the scene, and a red team of ‘overts’ who were to enter the factory and cause as much damage to property as possible before the police arrived to arrest them.
Generally, I accept that the action was well organised. But equally, it did not remotely go to plan. The footage from inside of the factory makes that abundantly clear. What you see in that footage is chaos, not a carefully executed plan.
You see members of the red team trying to respond to the unexpected presence of security guards as best as they can by shouting, by swearing, by lighting flares, by holding their sledgehammers in such a way to try and look as intimidating as possible without actually using them as weapons of offence. But “a plan to use the sledgehammers to injure or incapacitate the security guards if necessary”? Please – that’s not what you can see in that footage.
Don’t forget that everyone involved in this action, including the organisers, were laypeople. It wasn’t some sort of military operation by professional, trained and qualified soldiers. In fact, none of the red team had any prior experience of being involved in an action like this. I mean no disrespect to any of them, but they were completely out of their depth.
Although there was some some contingency planning, it was wholly inadequate due to several unexpected events occurring that considerably derailed the action. I want to identify five specific things for the jury.
- Something happened outside the factory, far out of the knowledge or sight of the red team which had never previously happened in hundreds of actions. It began when security guard, Nigel Shaw, ran towards a stationary member of the black team who was armed with an axe and a whip, blindsided him and whacked him with an umbrella. You’ve seen the body-worn footage. I’m sure you’ll be watching it again when you retire. Now, this was quite obviously totally unexpected. But what happened after that was that Nigel Shaw and Angelo Volante disarmed that member of the black team, restrained and detained him, and dragged him around the corner of the building. Until that happened, members of the black team had been engaging in making as much noise and creating as much smoke as possible by shouting and setting off fireworks and flares. They were also armed with weapons, including axes and whips, which were being held in such a way as to be visible to the security guards. And the strategy, you may think, of the black team was clear. It was to create as much chaos as possible, to look as intimidating as possible, to distract security guards for as long as possible to give the red team as much time as possible to barricade themselves inside the factory so they could damage as much property belonging to Elbit as possible before the police arrived and they were arrested. Up to the point of that umbrella incident, nobody in the black team was attacking anybody. I must be clear that I am not criticising Mr Shaw – he was a security guard, entitled to use reasonable force against trespassers – and consequently a number of the black team tried to rescue the one who had been detained. Although the guards’ BWV is far from clear, it must have been during time that Mr. Shaw was unfortunately assaulted and suffered a wound to his head that later had to be closed with staples. I want to be clear about this – the assault on Mr. Shaw should never have happened. I’m not justifying it in any way whatsoever. But to suggest that the assault on Mr. Shaw was part of a plan is, on the evidence, absurd.
- The jury knows that the red team had in their rucksacks, ropes and tape. The plan, several defendants told the jury, was to use these ropes and tape to barricade themselves inside to delay any entry by the security guards, and eventually the police. But the organisers had no idea in advance that the design of the doors in the warehouse wouldn’t allow that. They didn’t have handles, so consequently, barricading was impossible. They tried, and it was hopeless to put up that wooden pallet on one of the doors, but it was hardly a barricade. And so this was the second thing that went wrong.
- The red team hadn’t expected security to enter – they were meant to be dealing with the people outside. You you can see on the CCTV and BWV footage and from their reactions that they were taken by surprise. While members of the red team were still able to destroy a considerable amount of Elbit property, including drones and other military equipment, the action clearly didn’t go to plan.
- The fourth thing to go wrong was that they only had about 20 minutes inside the factory before the police arrived. They clearly thought they would have much more time than that, hence the fact that some of the defendants brought food with them in the rucksacks.
- The final thing to go wrong was Sam Corner striking Sergeant Evans on her back with a sledgehammer. Whatever the jury decides in relation to Count Four, it should obviously never have happened. Mr Corner’s barrister, Mr. Wainwright, will undoubtedly address you in detail on this matter. I just want to say that like the assault on Mr. Shaw, it was clearly not part of a plan. Only Sam Corner has been charged with that assault – none of the other members of the red team have been charged with intentionally assisting or encouraging Sam Corner to strike Sergeant Evans with a sledgehammer. This is the clearest indication that what happened arose in a split second and could not have been expected or predicted by any of Sam Corner’s co-defendants and was absolutely not pre-planned. Even the prosecution isn’t alleging that any defendant other than Sam Corner is criminally responsible for what happened to Sergeant Evans. That’s why only Sam Corner is charged on count four.
The reason I’ve set out at some length what went wrong with this action is that it is important evidence for you to bear in mind when you consider the evidence as a whole, and in particular the prosecution’s contention, which we say is wholly unsupported by the evidence, that all those involved in this action – the organisers, the black team and the red team, were acting together as part of a joint plan which involved the use of unlawful violence against people, if necessary.
5 The missing CCTV footage from inside the factory
The jury still does not have a satisfactory answer as to what precisely has happened to this missing footage.
In her closing speech, Ms Heer floated the possibility that the defence might say that the absence of certain footage was suspicious. Well, she was right to forewarn you about that. Because, yes, you may think it is suspicious or at least utterly baffling and ultimately unfair to the defendants.
The jury were given a plan of the factory during the prosecution opening when the jury bundles were distributed. And then you were given the smaller plan with the handwriting on it towards the end of the prosecution case. And you will note the differences. They are the identification on the smaller plan of four additional cameras, 22, 23, 24, and 25, and the angles at which they were filming. If you look at what 22, 23, and 24 were filming, they clearly covered relevant spaces within that warehouse.
Because the jury only had the larger plan during the opening, there was no mention by Ms Heer of cameras 22 to 25. So how has it come about that this evidential issue became the final thing you heard about during the prosecution case? You may remember it first arose when Ms Hamad, on behalf of Leona Kamio, asked the first prosecution witness, Detective Constable Phoebe Webber, who was assisting prosecuting counsel in presenting the CCTV evidence, whether the witness knew where those cameras were. And Detective Constable Weber said she did not.
The first witness to mention one of those cameras was Angelo Volante, when also cross-examined by Ms Hammad. When cross-examined, he said there was a camera that covered that alcove area, and it turns out he was right. That triggered, you now know, a number of questions by the defence. And this is not rocket science. You can imagine the obvious question that any defence lawyer would ask in this situation. Is Mr. Volante right? But, despite their evidence and their efforts, there remain unanswered questions.
So what is the evidential position now, taking all that evidence that you subsequently heard into account? We know that cameras 22 to 25 were all functioning properly and recording on the night of the action. We don’t know what has happened to the footage from those four cameras or what the frame rates of these four cameras were. Now, it’s important to note, pausing there, that even if they were only recording a frame every 17 seconds like camera 21, they would still contain footage of some of the defendants, given we know the areas these cameras covered and how long some of the defendants were in those areas on the night.
For example, one of the stills from camera 21, which I’m sure Mr. Morris will be addressing you about in due course, shows Mr. Volante kicking Jordan Devlin. So even a camera with a 17-second lapse between recording is potentially a camera that can produce useful evidence. Now, as I see it—and obviously the jury will assess this, whether this is a fair conclusion—there are only two possible answers to the mystery of the missing footage.
The first is that the footage recorded on the night of the action by cameras 22 to 25 was not shown to Detective Sergeant Sarah Grant when she attended the Elbit factory the next day, 7th August. Or she failed to notice the defendants in the footage from in particular cameras 22, 23 and 24 and therefore didn’t have that footage downloaded and copied.
I can’t think of a third possibility. The cameras we know were working and recording, so either Sarah Grant wasn’t shown it or she just missed it. Let me deal with the latter possibility first. You’ll remember her evidence. I suppose it’s possible. Everybody’s fallible. It’s possible that she could have made an error. She was viewing footage from multiple cameras simultaneously on multiple screens. The jury will remember my questions in relation to that. But she told you that she downloaded and copied all footage that showed movement when she was viewing that footage when she attended the factory. And we know that she downloaded and copied footage from camera 21, which recorded, as I’ve said, frames every 17 seconds. So she didn’t miss that.
It’s a matter for the jury, but you may think that it’s unlikely that this experienced police officer would have missed relevant footage from other cameras. So what about the first possibility? Is it possible that Detective Sergeant Grant was not shown the footage recorded on the night of the action by cameras 22 to 25 when she attended the Filton factory? And if so, what’s happened to the footage?
The prosecution could have called Witness Alpha to answer the unanswered questions. It was Witness Alpha, after all, who Sergeant Grant told you she met when she attended the factory and with whom she subsequently communicated by email. Witness Alpha, Ms Grant told you, was a senior member of Elbit security, who she believed was high up in the company. I’m referring to him as Witness Alpha because his identity, as you know, has been withheld from the defence. And if I’m wrong that Witness Alpha was the appropriate witness, the prosecution could have called someone else from Elbit to deal with this unanswered question.
But no Elbit witness has been called. The security guards, you will remember, were not employed by Elbit directly. They were employed by another company.
So Elbit remains in the shadows, hidden and protected, but not, ladies and gentlemen, in the corridors of power where no doubt they are welcomed, wined, and dined, whilst Charlotte and all the other co-accused in this case have been denied bail and have been locked up for 17 months.
The long and the short of the missing footage saga is that it is a total mess.
But let me be clear about something in case I’m later accused of this. I am not inviting the jury to speculate about what the missing footage might show. I’m not inviting you to speculate about what Witness Alpha, or any other Elbit witness if called, would have told you if they had been called by the prosecution. That would be wholly wrong. However, you are absolutely entitled to draw reasonable conclusions from the evidence that you’ve heard on this topic, which I hope I’ve summarised fairly for you.
The jury is entitled to draw reasonable conclusions as to what has happened to the missing footage and why it is not part of the evidence in this case. What conclusions you think are reasonable to draw is entirely a matter for the jury and not for anybody else because you are the sole judges of the facts. I’ll just return to the suggestion floated by Ms Heer during her closing speech that the defence is allegedly seeking to take advantage of the gaps in the footage.
If that were true, why is it the defence and not the prosecution that’s been trying to get to the bottom about this footage, why is it the defence that has been encouraging the prosecution to call witnesses to explain the mess, whatever that explanation might be? It’s not our fault—and I’m speaking now collectively for the defence—that the prosecution did not disclose to us the relevant material on this before the trial began, and that it was only disclosed after we started asking questions as a result of the answers that Ms Hammad received from the questions she was asking Detective Constable Webber and then Angelo Volante.
It’s not our fault that the key questions about the missing footage remain unanswered.
That is all I want to say about that fifth and final general topic. I’ve now completed all I want to say about those matters.
At this point the court adjourned for lunch.
After lunch Mr Menon began dealing with the particular three charges against his client, Charlotte Head.
Aggravated burglary is count one on the indictment and is the most serious of the three charges that all the defendants face. How you approach the charges is a matter for you, but the prosecution have drafted the indictment in the order they have – aggravated burglary, criminal damage, violent disorder – with good reason, and I’m going to follow that same approach as well.
The first general point I make – and I’m not going to beat around the bush about this – is that to prosecute these defendants with aggravated burglary, given the evidence in this case, I’d suggest is manifestly misconceived and amounts to deliberate prosecutorial overkill. A jury could not possibly be sure on the evidence, that Charlotte or any of her co-defendants is guilty of this most serious of criminal charges.
The indictment says that the six defendants, with others, entered with intent to do unlawful damage to the building or anything therein, and at the time of committing the said entry, had with them weapons of offence, namely sledgehammers.
The first thing I want to say about the particulars of the offence is that it’s important to remember that a sledgehammer is only a weapon of offence (a sort of legal definition), if it is intended to be used to injure or incapacitate another person. In other words, a sledgehammer without the necessary intention is not a weapon of offence.
Bearing that in mind, the key question is whether the defendants intended to use the sledgehammers that they had with them, to injure or incapacitate a security guard if the need arose, when they entered the Elbit building without permission. And it’s the building that’s important as opposed to the premises, which would include the yard, for example.
His Lordship has given you a Route To Verdict with three questions, and it’s the third question that is the clincher, so to speak, in this case. But let’s go through all of them.
First – are you sure that on the 6th of August, 2024, the defendant entered Elbit’s building without permission? I’ll address you solely on behalf of Charlotte in relation to this, and obviously, there’s no dispute that when she drove the prison van through the shutters into the building, she was entering without permission. So, in her case, there is no issue as far as that is concerned.
Second – are you sure that at the time of entering Elbit’s building, the defendant intended to damage property in the building? Again, in her case, no dispute. She told you that was her intention.
Next we come to the key third question. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but let’s just read it. “Are you sure that the defendant had with them a sledgehammer, which at the time of entering the building, they…” let’s put Charlotte’s name in… “Are you sure that Charlotte had with her a sledgehammer, which at the time of entering the building, she intended to use to cause injury to or incapacitate a security guard if needed, or encouraged or assisted a co-defendant to have with them a sledgehammer, which at the time of entering the building, they both intended to be used by the co-defendant for that purpose?”
The reason that this is a bit wordy is that in respect of any crime committed by multiple people, you can have a principal party who commits the act (or principal parties), and you can have secondary parties who intentionally encourage or assist the act with the same state of mind. They can both be guilty, the principal parties and the secondary parties, depending on the evidence. The question is wordy because the first bit is addressing the conduct of the principal party, and the bit in parentheses is addressing the conduct of a possible secondary party.
Bearing that question in mind, there are four key legal points to emphasise about aggravated burglary as a criminal offence. The first is that in order to answer that third question in relation to aggravated burglary (which is fundamentally about intention), you will need to consider the state of mind of each defendant.
In this case, there’s no direct evidence of intention, such as a confession by a defendant. Rather, the prosecution allege that there is other evidence, circumstantial evidence in this case, from which the jury can reasonably conclude that each defendant had the necessary intention. So your task when considering whether there is any such evidence is a far from straightforward task.
I say this because you have to avoid any guess or speculation when considering what a defendant’s state of mind was at the relevant time. You know this because the jury have been given a legal direction from His Lordship that guessing or speculating is expressly forbidden.
The problem is (an obvious point, but important to make), that it’s not always easy to distinguish between a guess or a speculation on the one hand, and a reasonable conclusion from the evidence on the other. But that’s precisely what you must do in respect of every factual conclusion you reach in this case, not only in relation to aggravated burglary. The jury must reach a proper and reasonable conclusion on the evidence, as opposed to a guess or a speculation.
And you also know that any reasonable conclusion you reach is one that you must be sure about. That’s the standard of proof in a criminal trial. It used to be called “beyond reasonable doubt.” We’ve simplified the language now – “You must be sure”. Anything less than that, the only appropriate verdict is not guilty. You have to be sure before you convict, nothing less will do. It’s about looking into the mind of the individual defendants, drawing reasonable conclusions from other evidence, not guessing or speculating.
The second point is that to be guilty of aggravated burglary, the defendant must have the necessary intention at the time when they enter the building without permission – i.e. when the van went through the shutters and ended up in the loading bay. That’s the time at which the necessary intention has to be there in the minds of each individual defendant. That is the relevant time.
The third point (and these aren’t new points – they’re all in His Lordship’s legal directions), is that an intention only to frighten or scare a security guard with a sledgehammer when entering the building without permission is not enough. I suggest it is not strong evidence – as Ms. Heer put it on Tuesday in her closing speech – of an intent to injure. Do you remember what she said? “If somebody has an intent to frighten them, that’s really strong evidence of an intent to injure”. I’m sorry, it isn’t. They’re completely different. They’re completely different in the circumstances. Be careful about that. What you need is quite explicit – there has to be that intention to injure or incapacitate a security guard at the point of entry, at that time of entry.
The fourth point is that, although no defendant is saying that they formed an intention to injure or incapacitate someone after they entered and when they were confronted by security guards, even if they did, it’s important to remember that an intention formed later is not enough. The intention has to be at the time of entry.
So putting all that together, my overarching point on aggravated burglary on behalf of Charlotte is that there is simply no evidence from which you could reasonably conclude that she—or any of the other co-defendants for that matter – when entering the Filton factory without permission, intended, if the need arose, to injure or incapacitate any security guard with a sledgehammer, or to intentionally assist or encourage any of her co-defendants to do so with that same intention.
There are nine things in terms of the evidence that I hope will assist:
1 Charlotte has no previous convictions or cautions. In fact prior to the 6th of August 2024, she’d never been arrested before. His Lordship has given a direction about good character. It’s at Section 8 of the legal directions. Although previous good character is not an absolute defence – hardly surprising – it is a positive feature which should be taken into account in Charlotte’s favour when assessing her credibility – when you consider whether you accept what she’s told you. It’s potentially relevant in terms of assessing the credibility of the account given to you by a defendant.
It’s also a positive feature which you should take into account in a defendant’s favour, in that if a defendant has not offended previously, it may make it less likely they’ve offended on this occasion. Now, obviously, the weight that you, the jury, give to a defendant’s previous good character is a matter for you. As with all factual matters, the jury decides how important any evidence is. But given the seriousness of the allegations in this case, you may think that Charlotte’s previous good character speaks volumes and is hugely significant when assessing whether or not she has that intent to injure or capacity, or whether she had that intent at the relevant time.
2 It’s not just that she has no previous convictions or cautions – she’s someone of positive good character. I’ve already addressed you at length about her background and her work You also heard good character evidence about Charlotte read to you from two witnesses. I’m sure His Lordship will remind you about the detail of that later. They both described Charlotte in glowing terms. It’s nonsensical to suggest that someone like her would have signed up to a plan involving the use of violence to injure or incapacitate a security guard with sledgehammers if the need arose. Everything you know about her suggests the contrary, namely that she would never have signed up to that kind of plan.
3 In addition to her positive good character, there are the principles and values that she clearly holds dear and which have governed her life. She told you that she’s anti-war and anti-violence. Remember the job that she was doing at this time in 2024 – helping and protecting women and children fleeing domestic violence. And she went even beyond that, telling you she doesn’t think it is morally right to use violence in any way. She doesn’t believe it works as a political strategy. In other words, nobody, as far as she was concerned, was to be physically harmed during this action.
She told you too, that the red team had agreed that red line of no violence against the person. To convict Charlotte of aggravated burglary, you would have to be sure that all of what she told you about her commitment to nonviolence was an elaborate lie, and that in truth she would have been perfectly prepared to strike a security guard with a sledgehammer to injure or incapacitate if the need arose. With all due respect, how could you possibly reach that conclusion?
4 You’ve heard evidence from Charlotte and the other defendants about the hundreds of previous actions by Palestine Action over the years, in relation to the absence of violence. Why on earth 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. That’s the evidence that you’ve heard.
5 Before it was proscribed, it was an organisation active on social media and thriving on mass support from members of the public. It was an organisation, whatever one thinks about its methods, that was committed to making a positive contribution to the struggle for Palestinian freedom and self-determination. 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.
6 I’ve already spoken about the Palestine Action documents in the jury bundle, and what Ms Heer said about them in her closing speech. None of those documents speak about using violence or causing injury to security guards if the need arose. None of them even speak about the fundamental right of using reasonable force to defend oneself or another if attacked. The best, from a prosecution perspective, is a reference to the covert black team, possibly having to push back and overwhelm security. But there’s not a single reference to the overt red team having to use force against security guards, whether the need arose or not. If the prosecution is right, and the plan all along was, if necessary, to injure or incapacitate security guards with sledgehammers, then this, you might think, would have explicitly featured somewhere in these detailed planning documents. The Crown cannot have its cake and eat it in relation to this point.
Is there any evidence that Charlotte was party to using a sledgehammer to injure or incapacitate a security guard inside that factory? Short answer, no. Not one of the three security guards, Mr Shaw, Mr Volante or Mr Luke, alleges that Charlotte struck or attempted to strike them with a sledgehammer, let alone injured or incapacitated them with a sledgehammer. And there’s no CCTV or body-worn footage of Charlotte striking or attempting to strike any of them. The best, from a prosecution perspective, is a few seconds of footage from Mr. Luke’s BWV footage of Charlotte standing, with a sledgehammer resting on her shoulder, a few meters away from where Leona Kamio and Mr Luke are tussling over another sledgehammer, which they’re both holding. Charlotte does nothing with the sledgehammer she’s holding – she doesn’t strike Mr Luke with it, she doesn’t swing it, she does nothing. In her closing speech, Ms Heer said Charlotte was threatening unlawful violence by brandishing the sledgehammer at Mr Luke. Come on – that is so totally over the top. She is not threatening Mr Luke. She’s just standing there. It’s literally up for two seconds. And then what does she do? She turns around, hands the sledgehammer to Mr. Devlin, and runs off to smash more property.
You may think that what you can see in that footage is a nonviolent woman, totally out of her depth. She doesn’t know what to do, and so she does nothing. How can you infer from that, an intent to injure or incapacitate a security guard? Where is the evidence of aggravated burglary? What about secondary participation in aggravated burglary? There’s no evidence, either from a security guard or from the footage, that Charlotte intentionally assisted or encouraged one of her co-defendants to use a sledge hammer against a security guard.
7 If you look at both the CCTV and the body-worn footage, at the interactions between the red team and the security guards, the only person who uses a sledgehammer as a weapon of offence to strike another person was Mr Volante, who struck Jordan Devlin on two separate occasions with a sledgehammer and threatened others with it too. I’m at a complete loss as to how you could ever, given the evidence, convict Charlotte of aggravated burglary. I repeat, there’s no evidence from which you could reasonably infer an intention on her part to injure or incapacitate a security guard with a sledgehammer, either when she entered the factory without permission or, for that matter, at any time prior to her arrest.
8 I’ll return briefly to Mr Corner striking Sergeant Evans with a sledgehammer. As you know, the third question in relation to aggravated burglary is limited to security guards. It doesn’t extend to police officers. In any event, Sam Corner striking Sergeant Evans with a sledgehammer is not something that you can properly take into account against Charlotte as additional evidence in support of the prosecution case. Firstly, because only Sam Corner is charged on Count Four. None of his co-defendants have been charged with intentionally assisting or encouraging him. Secondly, Charlotte together with Fatima Zainab Rajwani, was face down on the ground somewhere else in the warehouse when Sam Corner struck APS Evans. How, in all fairness, could you rely on what happened subsequently, when she’s lying face down on the ground, as additional evidence in support of the prosecution case against her?
9 Have any of the three security guards suffered injuries from the red team which establish an intention to injure or incapacitate the security guards with sledgehammers if the need arose? Mr Shaw said that all his physical injuries were sustained outside the factory before he came inside. That’s positive evidence of the red team having no intention to injure or incapacitate him. It completely contradicts the prosecution case.
Mr Volante told you he suffered some minor injuries, a laceration to his right wrist, a blood blister to his left thumb, a scrape to his knee and some aches and pains in his muscles and shoulder. He didn’t specify when he sustained those injuries. If you watch Mr Shaw’s BWV footage from outside the factory, you might think Mr Volante almost certainly sustained the minor injuries that he did when members of the black team rescued the member of the black team who Shaw and Volante were detaining. Immediately after that, when you can see on the footage members of the black team using whips against Mr Volante. That, you may think, was when he sustained those relatively minor injuries. And Mr Luke, the only injury he mentioned was a small cut to his finger that didn’t require any medical attention.
So putting that all together, how on earth do those minor injuries suffered by Mr Volante establish an intention on the part of the members of the red team to injure or incapacitate the security guards if the need arose. I’m sorry to say this, but the prosecution case on aggravated burglary is so weak, so dangerous, and so misconceived, please do not fall for it.
If you take these nine points into account, I suggest the only way that you could possibly infer from the evidence that Charlotte, or any of her accused for that matter, when entering the factory without permission, intended to injure or incapacitate a security guard with a sledgehammer if the need arose, would be to ignore the evidence altogether and engage in impermissible speculation instead. That is why I say to you that the only just verdict on the count of aggravated burglary is one of not guilty.
Now to criminal damage. Let’s start again by looking at the indictment on count two, that on the 6th August 2024, the defendants without lawful excuse, destroyed or damaged property belonging to Elbit Systems UK Ltd, intending to destroy or damage such property or being reckless as to whether such property would be destroyed or damaged.
During Sam Corner’s evidence, a jury member sent a note to His Lordship 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”.
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.
So 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.
On Tuesday His Lordship read out the legal directions and the Route To Verdict, and he added – not in writing, but orally – that questions 2.1 and 2.2 in relation to criminal damage were “unlikely to cause you difficulty, given there was no dispute that the defendants who had given evidence at least intentionally damaged property in Elbit’s premises”.
Now, arguably Jordan Devlin is in a different position because he decided not to give evidence, but as far as criminal damage is concerned, my focus will be on Charlotte and the other four who gave evidence.
So that’s what His Lordship said to you, and 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?
You could be forgiven for thinking that His Lordship is in fact directing you, as a matter of law, to convict Charlotte, who I’ll focus on for now, 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.
The jury has every right to be confused about this 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. They are fundamentally different. Let me try and explain it.
If you look at the legal directions and the first section, headed Functions Of Judge And Jury, you’ll see it’s quite lengthy. I’m not going to go through it point by point, but I’d ask you to read it carefully when you retire. All the directions in this document are important, but I’d suggest that the directions on the function of judge and jury are particularly important in this case. The key point to summarise is that the facts, and the verdicts you return having considered the facts, are solely for you.
So 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. So, for the avoidance of any doubt about this, I am absolutely not asking you to disregard His Lordship’s legal directions. On the contrary, I’m asking you to follow them, in particular this section on functions of judge and jury, and remind you that nobody, not even His Lordship, can dictate to you what factual conclusions to reach in this case, nor direct you to convict the defendants of any of the charges they face.
Indeed, it was as long ago as 1670 that the independence of the jury was definitively established beyond question. William Penn and William Meade were Quakers. They were prosecuted for preaching to an unlawful assembly. It was a crime in 1670 (about 20 or 30 years after the end of the English Civil war) to have a religious assembly of more than five people outside the auspices of the Church of England. And 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. As the jurors were being taken from court to prison, William Penn, it is said, shouted out, “You are Englishmen, mind your privilege, give not away your right”, to which one member of the jury, Edward Bushel, replied, “Nor shall we ever do.” 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:
Near this site, William Penn and William Meade were tried in 1670 for preaching to an unlawful assembly in Grace Church Street. 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.
Putting that all together, members of the jury, you can find Charlotte and her co-defendants not guilty of criminal damage. It is a perfectly fair and proper verdict for you to return in this case. Please don’t think for one moment that you are somehow barred as a matter of law from doing so. Indeed, you should find Charlotte and her co-defendants not guilty of criminal damage. It will undoubtedly take great courage and independence, I accept, to do so. But the facts ultimately are solely for you. Please don’t forget that. And don’t worry – the good news is that we’ve moved on since 1670. There is no prospect of you being imprisoned or fined for the factual conclusions you reach or for the verdicts you return.
And that brings me, as far as criminal damage is concerned, to His Lordship’s summing up of the evidence, which will follow defence speeches. Now, I have no idea how he is going to pitch this, how he is going to approach his summary of the evidence. He might do what most judges do these days, namely sum up the evidence without making any comment, without expressing any opinion, without any edge, without any spin, without any innuendo, i.e. 100% neutrality. You may think that would be the fairest approach to take, given a trial judge is like a referee or umpire. But our system does allow judges to make comment and express opinion, even strongly, in certain circumstances. As long as the summing up remains balanced and impartial, as long as the fundamental right of every defendant to a fair trial isn’t undermined, as long as the jury is directed that you are entitled to reject any judicial opinion on the facts if you wish, as His Lordship has already directed you, and as long as any judicial opinion or comment is not wrongly expressed as a legal direction that you must follow. So if His Lordship does decide to express an opinion on the evidence, please do not, under any circumstances, misinterpret that opinion as a legal direction, because it is not.
Obviously, if you agree with the judge’s opinion, you may adopt it. But the opposite is equally true. If you don’t agree with the judge’s opinion, you may reject it. That is your right. That is your privilege, as jurors, because I repeat, you are the sole judges of the facts. Nobody, not even His Lordship, can direct you to convict in this case. So that’s what I say about criminal damage.
Count three on the indictment is Violent Disorder – “that they used or threatened unlawful violence, when present together with others, being three or more persons in total, who used or threatened unlawful violence, and their conduct taken together was such as would cause a person of reasonable firmness present at the scene to fear for his or her personal safety.”
Violent disorder is a serious Public Order Act charge, which involves in the simplest terms, the use or threat of unlawful violence by three or more people present together. It’s designed as a public order charge for the protection of the hypothetical bystander of reasonable firmness. So, in other words, not somebody in this case, but somebody else who happened to be present together with the relevant parties. And it’s designed for the protection of that person in relation to any unlawful violence used or threatened.
Violent disorder can cover a multitude of factual situations. It can be committed in private, it can be committed in public, and includes not just violent conduct against the person, it also includes violent conduct against property. So, the jury will have to decide a number of different matters of fact before reaching verdicts on this.
The legal directions tell us that a person is guilty of violent disorder if they are present together with two or more people, that they used or threatened unlawful violence or assisted or encouraged at least three people to do so, intending those people to use or threaten unlawful violence, and if the conduct of the group taken together would cause a person of reasonable firmness at the scene to fear for their personal safety. It’s a bit of a mouthful. But the words that I really want to focus on at this stage are the words “present together”. And it’s really important that you remember the words ‘present together’ in relation to all three questions that you have to answer in relation to this criminal offence.
Question One in the Route To Verdict asks ‘Are you sure that the defendant was one of a group of three or more persons who were together at Elbit’s premises on the 6th of August 2024?” So that group of three or more people have to be present together. And so that’s the first thing.
And in the second question those words don’t appear, but they are implicit, and I’m sure His Lordship will make that clear when he sums up the evidence. So, “Are you sure that the defendant and at least two others used or threatened unlawful violence, that is violence that was not in self-defence or defence of another?” Those three people have to be present together, intending to, or that they assisted or encouraged at least three other people to, use or threaten unlawful violence, intending those persons to do so.
And in the third question, ‘Are you sure that the conduct of the group of three or more persons—again, it’s the same group from the earlier question, so it’s that same group of at least three people present together, would have caused a person of reasonable firmness who was present at the scene to fear for their personal safety. So that’s why I stress that whoever ultimately is in the group, they’ve got to be present together. It’s absolutely essential that you remember that.
Now, why do I say that? Because you can’t take into account the conduct of two or more persons other than Charlotte when considering whether she’s guilty or not of violent disorder, unless those two or more persons were present together with her.
So when you’re deciding whether she’s guilty or not of violent disorder, the conduct has got to be her conduct, and the conduct of at least two others who were present together with her. If they were not present together with her at the relevant time, then it shouldn’t be taken into account, because it’s not properly evidenced in respect of violent disorder.
But what does “present together” mean? These are words that should be given their ordinary English meaning. What “present together” means is in the same place at the same time. Simple as that. Now, it’s entirely a matter for you—because this is, again, a matter of fact. This is not a matter of law. It’s entirely a matter for you to decide who Charlotte “was present together with” at any time after she drove the prison van through the fence and entered Elbit’s premises. For the purposes of violent disorder, it’s not just the building, it’s the premises as a whole. So it’s from the point that the van comes through the fence.
So with that in mind, let’s look at the questions as they apply to Charlotte’s case. There’s no dispute that after she drove the prison van through the fence, she was at different times present together with at least two other people within Elbit’s premises. That’s accepted. Obviously, who is in that group is going to be one of the critical issues you have to decide. But I’ll come back to that. In general terms, that isn’t an issue in dispute.
So the complication in this case is that what happened in Elbit’s premises, wasn’t a single, continuous, seamless incident, like, for example, a pub brawl or a clash between opposing football fans. What happened, particularly inside the factory, was a series of spontaneous incidents between different groups of people at different times. So determining, in respect of any defendant, who at a particular time is a member of the group of ‘three or more present together’ is not straightforward.
The reason who you decide is in that group at any given time is so important, is that it will impact what conduct you take into account when deciding whether that “hypothetical bystander of reasonable firmness” would have feared for their personal safety. This charge is a bit of a minefield actually, frequently misunderstood even by lawyers.
The prosecution say the group consists of all those who participated in the action on the night in question – that they were all acting together in furtherance of a joint plan to use or threaten violence to people and property. In other words, the group includes the red team and it includes the black team. That’s the prosecution case. It’s a matter of fact for you to decide whether that’s right or not.
I make the same points I did about aggravated burglary in relation to the plan. So without repeating everything, in relation to violent disorder, the red team was never party to any joint plan to use or threaten unlawful violence to people. There is simply no evidence from which you could reasonably conclude the existence of such a plan. In fact, all the evidence I suggest you have on this issue is to the contrary. Consequently, it would be wholly unfair and improper, I suggest to you, to take into account any use or threat of unlawful violence by the black team outside the building as evidence for the purposes of violent disorder against the red team. The red team wasn’t even present together with the black team when, for instance, Nigel Shaw was assaulted by members of the black team outside the factory. It was some considerable distance away, around the corner and out of sight. The red team knew nothing about the assault on Shaw. How could it possibly be right to hold that against Charlotte for the purposes of violent disorder?
In relation to violent disorder your starting point should be that the group of three or more persons is strictly confined to the red team. That’s the only fair and proper factual position to take in this case.
But the next question is “Are you sure that the defendant and at least two others used or threatened unlawful violence, that is, violence that was not in self-defence or defence of another, intending to do so, or that they assisted or encouraged at least three other people to use or threaten unlawful violence, intending those persons to do so?”
I’ve already stressed the importance of the words ‘present together’, which do not expressly appear there, but implicitly do. The importance in relation to this question is this. No defendant can be convicted of violent disorder unless they used, threatened, intentionally assisted, or intentionally encouraged unlawful violence. In other words, violence not in self-defence or defence of another. That’s the first point. Furthermore, no defendant can be convicted of violent disorder unless they were present together with at least two others who also used threatened, intentionally assisted or intentionally encouraged unlawful violence. That’s the basic foundations of the charge.
So it means that you will need to decide precisely what unlawful violence—used, threatened, assisted or encouraged—can be laid at the door of each defendant. Only then can you to decide what overall conduct to take into account when applying that hypothetical bystander test. That’s the only way – for each person you have to go through that exercise. What did this person use, threaten, assist, or encourage?
Finally, the third ‘hypothetical bystander’ question. This isn’t easy because again, you’ve got to put yourselves in the shoes of the hypothetical bystander of reasonable firmness in deciding what the answer to the question should be. And you’ve got to answer it on a defendant-by-defendant basis. And obviously the answer to it will depend on who’s in the group and what conduct you’re taking into account, as a matter of fact.
Going back to my earlier point, it’s not like a pub brawl or a clash between opposing football fans who are all being indiscriminately attacked, or attacking each other. Because if it kicks off in a pub, you might well fear for your personal safety if you’re kind of parachuted in at that particular point. Likewise, the clash between opposing football fans. But in this case, because of the nature of what happens inside that factory, it’s important to bear in mind that the hypothetical bystander is not somebody who just falls out of the sky and is simply present to watch the prosecution’s favourite selection of individual episodes inside the factory from the vantage point of the security guards and their body-worn cameras, and ignore all those other episodes that take place, that paint a totally different picture. That wouldn’t be a fair way to approach the hypothetical bystander.
The hypothetical bystander is going to see everything happening inside that factory, not just what the prosecution wants them to see. Let me point out a few examples. The hypothetical bystander would see that there were three burly male security guards and six young people dressed in red, four of whom were relatively small young women, present inside the factory. They’d see that one of those security guards, namely Angelo Volante, putting it as neutrally as I can, was aggressive, if not violent, towards those in red. They’d see that a number of the women in red had real trouble holding the sledgehammers, let alone swinging them when damaging property, because they were heavy. They’d see that several of the individual confrontations taking place inside the factory never became physical and merely involved lots of shouting and/or swearing.
The hypothetical bystander would see one of the men in red, Mr Devlin, unarmed, trying to de-escalate the situation over time, and get one of the security guards, namely Mr Volante, who was armed with a sledgehammer, to calm down and leave. They’d see that most of those in red were single-mindedly focused on damaging as much property as possible, and were not a threat or a danger to them. The hypothetical bystander would see that although the people in red were on occasion armed with sledgehammers or crowbars, they were not in fact using them as weapons of offence against the security guard.
The list goes on. This is just a selection of things that don’t neatly fit in to how the prosecution says this incident inside the factory for those 15, 20 minutes, was unfolding. I hope you get the point. You have to decide who’s in the group and what unlawful conduct can properly be attributed to that group before you apply the hypothetical bystander test.
And whatever you do, please do not hold the conduct of Mr Volante when he was assaulting Jordan Devlin, or screaming at Fatema Zainab, against the defendants. That conduct in isolation may have led the hypothetical bystander to fear for their safety, but that can’t be laid at the door of the defendants.
Before I turn to the prosecution’s evidence I want to make some observations generally about the evidence of the three security guards, in relation to violent disorder.
I’ll be brief about Mr Shaw, because as you know, he accepted in cross-examination that he had no physical contact of any kind with anyone wearing red inside the factory. He wasn’t struck by anyone with a weapon inside the factory. His physical injuries were sustained outside the factory before he came inside. As far as the red team and violent disorder is concerned, Mr Shaw gave no evidence in support of the prosecution case. On the contrary, his evidence suggests none of the red team are guilty of violent disorder, because none of them used or threatened unlawful violence against him. So his evidence is of huge assistance to the defence, in fact, as far as what happened inside the factory is concerned.
I’ve got a bit more to say about Mr Volante, and I have to say, on Tuesday when Ms Heer was summarising the position in relation to Mr Volante, I was stunned about how she addressed you on him, because the man she described in such glowing terms was neither the man who gave evidence in this trial, nor the man who you see in that footage.
Let’s be clear, Mr Volante is the man who assaulted Jordan Devlin twice with a sledgehammer, clearly injuring him in the process. Mr Volante is the man who made no mention in his witness statement of 7th August about that, because, he says, he forgot. Mr Volante is the man who also kicked Jordan Devlin. The still, you’ll remember, from Camera 21.
He is also the man who ran into the factory with a whip that he’d confiscated from a member of the black team. Why did he do that? Why didn’t he leave the whip wherever he left the axe that he had also confiscated? And in relation to that whip, why did he make no mention of bringing the whip into the factory in that same witness statement the next day – 7th August. He told the jury that he forgot. There was a lot to remember, he said.
Why was he forgetting to include all the things he did, which he knew perfectly well would paint him in a bad light? Mr Volante is the man who was constantly seeking to escalate matters inside the factory, as opposed to de-escalate. Mr Volante was the man who screamed at the very top of his voice, with his face contorted, at Charlotte and Fatima Zainab. I described this when cross-examining Mr Luke as Mr Volante’s Incredible Hulk moment. Apologies if any of you thought that was a bad joke. But watch the footage. Look at his face.
Ms. Heer described that same episode on Tuesday to you as memorable. I thought that was a rather strange choice of words to describe the way that Mr Volante was behaving. But whatever conclusions you draw about this man, to suggest as Ms Heer did on Tuesday, that the only people prior to the arrival of the police who had force used or threatened against them were the security guards, is I’m afraid, wholly inconsistent with the footage in this case, wholly inconsistent.
And what about Mr Luke? Well I’ll be brief, because—I know it was a long time ago, but with all due respect to him, his evidence was so thoroughly confused and all over the place. He insisted that he had put his BWV camera on when he first entered the warehouse, even though we now know that he clearly did not. When inconsistencies between his evidence and the footage were pointed out to him, and he admitted getting mixed up about the order of events and using the wrong words, he also admitted mistakenly saying in his witness statement that he disarmed one of the women. I’m going to leave it beyond this. I anticipate that other defence counsel will have more to say about Mr Luke, but his evidence was just really all over the place.
Now let me turn to Charlotte and her actions inside the factory, starting with ‘unlawful violence to property’. I’ll deal with this very quickly. Obviously, it will depend on your verdict on count two. If you’ve found Charlotte not guilty of criminal damage, then that will mean she did not use unlawful violence against property. If you found her guilty of criminal damage, then that will mean that she did use unlawful violence against property, and you will take that violence into account, together with any other violence you find in respect of her and the other members of the ‘group of three or more’, when you apply the hypothetical bystander test.
What about unlawful violence against the person? There are two matters that the Crown alleges against Charlotte in relation to unlawful violence against the person. The first is that she used a whip on Mr Volante, and the second is that she used a whip on Mr Luke.
As far as Mr Volante is concerned and the alleged use of a whip against him, there’s no CCTV or BWV footage of Charlotte hitting him with a whip. Mr Volante said it happened in the area of that alcove. And even more important than the fact that there’s no footage of it, Ms Heer didn’t put it to Charlotte in cross-examination. So how are you supposed to conclude, so that you are sure, that Charlotte hit Mr. Volante with a whip, when the prosecution, it seems, isn’t sure about it, because it was never put to her when she gave evidence?
What about the whip on Mr. Luke? You’ve seen the footage on multiple occasions, and you can watch it as many times as you want when you retire. There is some very brief body-worn footage of Charlotte holding a whip in front of her, whilst Ms Kamio and Mr Luke are tussling over a sledgehammer, both not letting go. Ms Heer said to you that if you look carefully, you see Charlotte whip Mr. Luke twice. That was what was suggested. Well, I dispute you can see that. You’re going to have to resolve that issue.
Charlotte told you that she was half-heartedly waving the whip towards Mr Luke – a pathetic deterrent – when he grabbed hold of it and she let go of it. She denied striking him. She accepted that she might have hit the whip on the ground, but she denies hitting him with it. Mr Luke told you that a female tried to hit him with a whip, but he caught it in his hand, and he later said he wasn’t actually sure if he grabbed it or not. Obviously, the jury will have to look at the footage to resolve this. But taking it all together, how can you be sure that she hit Mr Luke or tried to hit Mr Luke with the whip? I suggest it’s far from clear. You may think it’s as likely or more likely, that that Charlotte was simply holding the whip in front of her, waving it around, maybe hitting the ground with it, all because she was worried about Leona Kamio getting harmed and didn’t know what else to do. Seconds later, the whip is no longer in her hand, and she’s standing there with a sledgehammer. All of this happens in just a few seconds.
So that’s the allegation of use of unlawful violence against her. But what about the threat of unlawful violence? I suggest she did nothing that amounted to a threat of unlawful violence. Just holding a sledgehammer for a few seconds during the tussle between Mr Luke and Ms Kamio, is not threatening Mr Luke in any way.
So that’s what’s alleged against her individually, but what about her ‘intentionally assisting or encouraging others’ on the red team to use or threaten unlawful violence? Well, there’s nothing actually alleged against her about this. There’s a very broad brush approach being taken as far as secondary participation in violent disorder is concerned, in the sense that each of the defendants was intentionally assisting or encouraging the others, and that’s really how it was put.
This is a serious criminal charge, and you’re going to have to consider it carefully, and identify what facts to consider when assessing whether the conduct of the group of three or more meets the hypothetical bystander test. You can’t deal with vague stuff here. You’ve got to make specific factual decisions. And it’s only on the basis of those specific factual decisions that you can answer the third question, the hypothetical bystander question that you have in your Route To Verdict.
One final point on this. Any use or threat of unlawful violence that occurred after Charlotte was face down on the ground shouldn’t be included in the conduct of the group for the purposes of questions 3.2 and 3.3. It’s an obvious point, isn’t it? It would be really unfair and improper. How is she criminally responsible for what other people are doing in other parts of the warehouse once she gets onto the ground? That is the fair, factual approach for you to take in this case. She cannot be held criminally responsible for whatever happens after that point.
Even if you take together the use or threat of unlawful violence by other members of the group present together with Charlotte at the scene, I suggest the hypothetical bystander would not have feared for their personal safety. This was not, I repeat, like a pub brawl, or a fight between opposing football fans, an indiscriminate free-for-all, which might well cause fear in the hypothetical bystander. This was very different from that. And if you look at it in that way, the questions will drive you, in Charlotte’s case, to return a verdict of not guilty on violent disorder.
I’ll deal with two brief topics before my concluding remarks.
First, the short GoPro video played to you, of Charlotte and Fatima Zainab laughing when they’re lying on the ground. One of them says “we broke into the most secure Elbit factory”, and the other says “You’ve been Pal-Actioned”. Firstly, remember the obvious point when you watch this, that they’d been on the ground for some time. They didn’t see what was happening elsewhere in that warehouse, and you need to bear that in mind.
When Charlotte gave evidence, she acknowledged that this footage did not look great, and it felt like that moment when you giggle at a funeral. That’s a pretty good description, because it was a bit silly and childish, quite frankly, in the circumstances. But she explained they were shaking at the time. They were frightened, and they just did something silly and stupid to calm themselves down. I appreciate it doesn’t do either of them any favours, and you are entitled to take it into account. But you may feel that ultimately it is of little help when deciding the three serious charges that they face and not really an important piece of evidence in the round. But that’s a matter of fact entirely for you.
The final issue is arrest and interview. After her arrest, Charlotte was taken to a police station, and in custody, before her first interview, she was further arrested on suspicion of having committed a terrorist offence. I suggest it’s another example of prosecutorial overkill, in this case by the police. She was never charged with a terrorist offence. Before her first interview, she had a private consultation with a solicitor who advised her to go ‘no comment’ to all the questions she was asked in interview, and instead to serve a brief prepared statement. She followed that advice.
So she’d been in custody for three days before her first interview. At the beginning of each interview, she was cautioned – “You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.” Her written statement is in the agreed facts – not in its entirety as some of it is ‘not relevant’ to this case.
“At no point did I use violence, serious or otherwise, against another person. I did not intend that violence should be used at any point. I strongly believe in non-violence, and I’m committed to this in all aspects of my professional and personal life. At no point did I see anyone other than security guards use violence against any other person. I did not carry any weapons. Nobody was carrying any type of incapacitant spray. No such spray was used other than by the police who used it against me when they entered the building. I did not see anyone fire fireworks towards security guards or police. I did not resist arrest. When I was told by security guards to get on the floor, I did so”. And then there’s a reference to a telephone number and a booking for the campsite. In evidence we also heard, although it’s not in here, that the first line of the prepared statement actually said, “I am not a terrorist”, because at that stage, she’d just been arrested in relation to that. She made no other comment to all questions.
There is a lengthy direction from the judge how to approach this, but I’ll try and boil it down to a couple of sentences. If you’re satisfied about certain preconditions which are set out in the document and you conclude that it’s right and proper to do so, you may take into account the fact that Charlotte did not mention when questioned by the police two facts on which she now relies, as additional support for the prosecution case. And those two facts are – one, that she did not expect the security guards to intervene, and two, that she did not know the black team would be in possession of whips or axes. So those are the only two facts the prosecution is relying upon in respect of her not having mentioned them in interview.
I say there are five reasons why you should not draw any adverse, any negative inference against Charlotte for the fact that she didn’t mention those two facts:
- In general, the failure to answer questions and interview on a particular topic does not prove guilt or innocence. Some defendants who are guilty answer questions in interview. Some don’t. Some defendants who are innocent answer questions in interview. Some don’t. It is illogical to conclude that the issue of whether or not you answer no comment is somehow indicative of guilt or not. It simply isn’t. It’s too broad a conclusion to reach in a situation like this.
- Charlotte was advised by her solicitor to go no comment. The prosecution is right – she could have rejected that advice. She is an adult with mental capacity. She could have answered questions anyway. But why would someone who has never been arrested before reject the advice of an experienced legal professional who is there to advise her in these circumstances? It would be mad to do that, wouldn’t it? If any of you or any of your loved ones ever had the misfortune to get arrested and were advised by a solicitor, having no experience at the police station at all, to go no comment in an interview, would you really reject that advice and answer questions anyway? Of course not.
- Charlotte told you she was in a complete state after being arrested on suspicion of having committed a terrorist offence. She was shocked and confused. She didn’t remember a lot about what had happened in the factory. She described it as the craziest 20 minutes of her life. She needed to watch the footage to get any sense of what was going on. She had to call an appropriate adult at one point because she couldn’t stop crying. An appropriate adult is somebody who the police call, for example, when a child is in a police station or someone who’s got mental health issues. That’s what was going on here at the time. She told you she couldn’t have given a coherent answer even if she wanted to, whilst in custody. So are you really going to hold her silence, her failure to mention those two facts, against her, given that was what was going on?
- Charlotte was not a professional criminal playing the system, hiding behind the right to silence so she could ambush the prosecution at trial. She knew what she had done and why she had done it. She participated in an action to damage property belonging to an Israeli arms company that she believed was complicit in a genocide. That was her case then, that is her case now. She’s not made anything up to suit the prosecution evidence. How could you conclude in those circumstances that the reason that she didn’t mention those two facts in interview was that she had no answer at the time or none that would stand up to scrutiny? It just doesn’t satisfy the necessary preconditions.
- Prepared statements are legal documents prepared by lawyers for defendants to sign. They’re not the entirety of any defendant’s account. That’s not the purpose of them. It would have been impossible for Charlotte’s solicitor to anticipate at that early stage what all the important factual issues were going to be at trial. How could that solicitor have known at the time that the two facts on which the prosecution now rely against Charlotte were in relation to guards intervening, and the black team having whips and axes – that those were going to be important matters that needed to be addressed in the prepared statement. Can you penalise Charlotte for what her solicitor chose to include and not include in that prepared statement? And in any event, why would Charlotte herself have been reasonably expected to mention those facts during interview?
Taking those five reasons into account, you will be driven to the conclusion, I hope, that it would not be fair and proper for you to hold the fact that Charlotte did not mention those facts against her as additional evidence in the prosecution case. And that’s why I ask you not to draw any adverse inference against her for not mentioning those two facts in the interview.
It’s been a long day and I hope you understand that this is my one and only opportunity to address you on behalf of Charlotte and there’s obviously so much to say, so I hope I haven’t taxed your patience.
Refaat Alareer was a Palestinian poet, academic and activist, who loved the writings of William Shakespeare and John Donne. He had a master’s degree from University College London and a PhD in English literature from a university in Malaysia. He lived in Gaza. He was married, he had six children. On the 6th of December 2023, he was killed, together with six other members of his extended family, in an Israeli airstrike, which has been widely reported by the international media, as having been a deliberate surgical targeting of an apartment where he was staying. Refaat Alareer was 44 years old. His poetry had been much loved and much respected in Palestine for many years. But since his killing, his poetry has gone internationally viral and will undoubtedly live on for many years to come, long after the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu and all those involved in the killing and destruction in Gaza have been forgotten.
I want to end by reciting what has become Refaat Alareer’s most famous poem, as it so beautifully encapsulates in a way that I could never replicate, not only the Palestinian tragedy, but also the hope for a better future, both of which lie at the very heart of this case. The poem is called “If I Must Die” by Refaat Alareer.
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze–
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself–
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale
Enough is enough.
Please, find Charlotte not guilty of aggravated burglary, criminal damage and violent disorder. These are fair and proper verdicts to return in her case. Acquit her so that she does not have to spend another day locked up behind bars.
Set her free. End the nightmare. Please. Enough is enough. Thank you so much for listening to me.
January 9th
Defence Barrister Tom Wainwright on behalf of Samuel Corner
“I was trying to protect her.”
Samuel Corner’s words, right at the end of the events of the 6th of August 2024, moments after what had taken place with police sergeant Evans, give you the clearest possible indication as to what his motivation, his purpose and his intention was when he swung that sledgehammer.
There’s no dispute that that’s what he said – Sergeant Evans agreed with Ms Heer that she’d recorded it in her statement the following day and that that is what he had said.
It can’t be something that he planned to say beforehand, because it wasn’t part of the plan for him to do this beforehand. It was never part of the plan for security guards to come in. It was not part of the plan for Mr. Corner to be PAVA-sprayed. It was never the plan for Ms Kamio to be tasered and knelt on, causing her to scream out in pain. It was not part of the plan for him to use the sledgehammer in this way. And nor was it an excuse that he’s likely to have thought upon the spur of the moment, having been taken to the floor and handcuffed, still reeling from the effects of the PAVA spray, not having quite realised what had happened.
Having seen Mr Corner giving evidence and taking into account everything you know about him, you may think that ‘thinking on his feet’ is not his strong point. He’s unlikely to be capable of having made that up in the circumstances.
“I was trying to protect her.”
The Crown have no explanation for this, because the only explanation is that it was an instinctive, honest and accurate utterance. It’s the core explanation for what had just happened. So the fact that it wasn’t repeated in interview is utterly irrelevant. The fact that the Crown say it’s set out in legal directions that you can conclude that he’s made that up since his interview, shows just how dangerous adverse inferences from silence can be. It’s clutching at straws.
When you go through the evidence through Samuel Corner’s eyes, you’ll find the answers to all of the allegations that he faces. Because that is how you approach the evidence. It appears throughout the legal directions, based on the circumstances as he believed them to be. His honest belief, even if mistaken.
The prosecution case is that this was all part of the plan – that these young people went into that factory intending to injure, even really seriously injure, anyone who got in their way. And they rely on Samuel Corner’s actions to make that point. That’s putting the cart before the horse. The fact that something has happened doesn’t mean that it was planned to happen. Mike Tyson famously said “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”. In other words, any plan, any theory, any strategy determined beforehand, whether detailed and meticulous or naive and idealistic, will go out of the window when confronted with unexpected, chaotic, cold, hard reality, because from then on, you’re acting on instinct. You can’t therefore, ladies and gentlemen, safely work back from what happened to decide that what happened must be what was planned, and I suggest that what took place in that warehouse can be explained not by any plan, but by an unworldly, unprepared and unsuited young man entering a situation where he was wholly out of his depth. You saw Samuel Corner in the witness box. Is he the raging psychopath that the prosecution make him out to be?
Samuel Corner never wanted to hurt anyone. His whole purpose and motivation was quite the opposite. When you listen to Sam and the evidence carefully, and apply your common sense and your understanding of people, those vital skills and attributes that you as jurors bring to the case, you will see where the truth lies.
—
Mr Wainwright said he would focus his speech on Count 4, which Mr Corner alone faces – that of causing grievous bodily harm with intent.
He reminded the jury of what they’d heard about Sam’s background – an Oxford graduate good at maths and language, with a particular intelligence better suited to translation, coding, and other theoretical rather than practical skills. Better suited to the library than to fast-moving real-world events. That night in Filton from when PC Buxton entered the factory to when Sam was sprayed in the eyes was just 15 seconds, and then it was no more than 45 seconds later that he struck PS Evans.
Earlier in the trial the jury had heard how Sam’s condition makes it hard for him in social situations and reading social cues, and he worries about hurting feelings. He has shown he is caring, gentle and compassionate, and his character references reveal he finds violence abhorrent, has never been in a fight or arrested, or even been involved in direct action, and who believed violence could never help the cause that he cared so much about.
He had plans and prospects for the year ahead – another reason not to consider violence – it would have destroyed his plans for the academic year and well beyond. The prosecution suggested the charges weren’t a surprise, but no-one expected being arrested by counter-terrorism police, or spending a long time in prison because no-one intended there to be any violence.
Mr Wainwright noted that there’s little evidence Sam was even involved to any great extent in the planning, other than in the GoPro chat. The prosecution have asked several of the defendants why no-one tried to get hold of the streamed footage to help their case, to which Mr Wainwright responded that it was a bit rich given the Crown’s failure to produce CCTV footage, with all the resources of the state and of Elbit at their disposal, while the defendants have been in prison with severe restrictions.
Remember Sam doesn’t actually have to ‘prove’ anything, but even so, the evidence shows that a message went out on the chat the evening after the action telling everyone to delete any raw footage, and despite extensive searches the police have not obtained that footage either. Apart from this, the very fact Sam agreed to wear a streaming GoPro points to the fact he had no intention to take part in violence that night. It would hardly be sensible to film yourself doing so.
The Crown admit that none of the offences in the planning documents mention serious violence, but invite the jury to read in things that simply aren’t there.
The main issue is whether Sam Corner thought security would realistically come in and there would be a need to use force and to injure them with a sledgehammer in self-defence or defence of another, and he had a solid intention to do so.
The Crown, said Mr Wainwright, suggest they must have expected heavy security. But recces showed only three guards, and even with an additional one that night there were only four. The Crown suggest it’s nonsensical to think the security would be distracted by the black team and follow them away from the factory, but in fact that’s what they did, even chasing them to the fence when they made their escape. The Crown say the defendants wouldn’t have believed security guards would have left them to it and called the police, but in fact that is what they were told would happen, and they believed it because that IS what happened on numerous occasions before.
We’ve heard that Mr Corner isn’t very materialistic or money conscious himself – he gave money as a student to the homeless, and in prison he has asked for people to make charitable donations on his behalf. Knowing he is someone with difficulties of assessing the way other people think, a security guard going to all that trouble to protect property might not make sense to him, especially to protect killing machines. He would easily have believed they would just call the police.
In the encounters with Mr Shaw, Mr Luke, and Mr Volante, Sam didn’t use his sledgehammer to injure or incapacitate any of them. Even though the plan didn’t suggest they’d be there, he doesn’t resort to what the Crown say is the back-up plan – to do so if necessary. Mr Wainwright explained that for aggravated burglary the Crown has to prove that when he entered the warehouse, Sam planned to cause injury if necessary, not just to scare someone to back off, or to block any blows. It was never the plan. Not even when Mr Luke grabs Ms Kamio’s sledgehammer and she falls to her knees. Not when Mr Shaw is refusing to leave, and Sam says “Come with me – I’ll show you the way out”. Even when Mr Volante struck the handle of his hammer into Jordan Devlin’s neck, Sam’s response was to try and knock the hammer out of his hand (not even hard enough to make him drop it), or attempt to knock the umbrella out of another guard’s hand.
He never tried to cause injury, and each time, Sam’s interaction was aimed at a particular individual. So would the ‘hypothetical bystander’ fear for their own safety in such circumstances? Surely they would see that any violence was specific to the circumstance, and any damage was aimed at property, focussed on property. When Sam Corner goes to smash up the toilet area, even Mr Shaw isn’t afraid to go and try and lock him in, but Mr Wainwright reminds us that the ‘hypothetical bystander’ is NOT one of the security or police in any case.
Mr Wainwright asked the jury to remember the prosecution’s opening speech. There was no mention of the PAVA spray in it. The court was only told about it in PC Buxton’s evidence confirming he used it just after Sam Corner responded to Mr Volante’s assault on Jordan Devlin. Buxton said it was a prohibited weapon that makes it hard to see and causes intense pain. Sam described it as like stinging nettles in and around his eyes. Although Mr Wainwright didn’t criticise PC Buxton’s deployment of it, given his perception at the time, he said it was very relevant to what happened next, which has to be looked at, not frame-by-frame in footage with time to consider and ask questions, but in terms of what was going through Sam’s mind.
He’s a young man with autism in an unfamiliar place, in an unfamiliar scenario, with alarms going off, a toxic smell in the air (as described by PC Buxton), being confronted by security guards. As what he believed were more security guards running in, he sees Mr Devlin knocked to the floor by Mr Volante with a sledgehammer, and as he reacts to that, he is sprayed with a substance that stings and blurs his vision.
In his evidence he said he couldn’t be sure who sprayed him or who was on the floor with Mr Devlin – there was a lot he couldn’t recall clearly at this time. With the benefit of hindsight and slow-motion footage he even accepted, when it was put to him in cross-examination, that it wasn’t reasonable. If he genuinely believed that Mr Devlin was under attack from the same person Sam had already seen assault him, this would have easily been in the realms of self-defence.
Mr Wainwright reminded the jury that at several points under cross-examination Sam said he couldn’t recall what had happened or what was in his mind, and that he didn’t want to guess. The prosecution’s suggestion that Mr Corner didn’t mention things in his interview because he made them up later is nonsense, because he would have said ‘this is what happened’ and ‘this is what I thought’, but instead he has obviously stuck to the unvarnished, honest truth that is was all unclear and confusing.
These events happened in a fast and confusing way over a year ago, and although it’s hard to disentangle what he thinks he thought then, and what he thinks now, looking at the footage, he is someone compelled to be honest to the point of pedantry, refusing to guess.
Mr Wainwright also reaffirmed that it’s up to the prosecution to prove guilt, and that if Mr Corner can’t remember things, it doesn’t make their version of events any truer. The jury can only make inferences that are safe and reasonable and they must be sure in order to convict.
Up to this point, the only evidence against Mr Corner is a slight bruise to PC Buxton’s right calf, which hadn’t even appeared two days later. And of the alleged second blow, damaging his police radio, PC Buxton accepted the damage could have happened at another time. So although the prosecution say Mr Corner was on a rampage at this time, this is the extent of his action, and none of what happened could have been foreseen, planned or something that he intended. So in terms of violent disorder, his actions may have been reasonable in defence of another in the circumstances as he believed them to be, and therefore not unlawful.
Mr Wainwright repeated the judge’s direction that the hypothetical bystander is not either police nor security, would not have been deploying prohibited weapons or grappling with people on the floor, and so would not have feared for their personal safety from Mr Corner.
Turning to the incident with police officer Evans, Mr Wainwright asked the jury to keep in mind that that Mr Corner’s vision is still impaired. He’s still trying to keep his eyes closed, and trying to rub them afterwards while he’s being detained by PC Buxton. Keep in mind Mr Corner said that things were mostly a blur. Keep in mind the sirens, the shouting, the noise, the smell. Imagine the impact on all of your senses, and imagine how Mr Corner would have been feeling in all of those circumstances. Keep in mind he’s just seen a member of security strike a fellow protester and then, he believes, struggling with them on the floor. Keeping in mind all of that, his reaction was not over the top.
Additionally, imagine Leona Kamio’s screams, not on video but in real-life at that moment, which even PC Buxton described as “horrible screams”, and which stuck with him for days. Sam would probably never have heard screams like that before, but the prosecution suggests this was all part of a plan. Sam undoubtedly believed at that moment that one of the females was being seriously injured, a reasonable and understandable conclusion, given everything going on.
But Mr Wainwright warned that it’s not whether the jury thinks it was reasonable, but it is Mr Corner’s honest perception of the situation at the time, that matters. He now accepts his perception was mistaken, and that he made a terrible mistake because Sergeant Evans wasn’t hurting anyone, but given what he believed at the time, he felt he had to help whichever of these small women it was, at risk of being seriously injured by one of the much larger security guards.
Mr Wainwright took a moment to clarify that Sergeant Evans was doing her duty and commendably so. Her actions, particularly in the aftermath, checking on the welfare of others, including Sam Corner himself, are a testament to her character and professionalism, and there was no challenge to any of her evidence. But sadly, that is certainly not the perception that Mr Corner had at the time. No doubt he wishes that he did. He said in closing that the position would have been clear had he taken the trouble to look, but it’s not about what he could or should have done with the benefit of hindsight. He didn’t have the benefits of the video footage the jury has seen. He didn’t have time for any detailed consideration.
He genuinely believed either Ms Kamio or Ms Rogers was in danger and there was no other reason for him to act as he did. He has no history of violence and abhors it. He did what he thought was necessary and then stopped – he didn’t follow it up with any kicks or punches. Despite the prosecution saying there was no sign he was going to stop, there is actually no sign he was going to continue.
The prosecution case is that he hit PS Evans twice, but even she says that only one swing made contact, and it’s important to see in the video evidence that the second swing comes down in the area where Evans had hold of Ms Kamio – another indication of what he was trying to achieve.
Prosecutor Ms Heer in her closing speech said it didn’t matter much in Count 4 whether Mr Corner believed Evans was security or police, and Mr Wainwright pointed out that the fact he didn’t mention it in his interview is irrelevant for that reason, but the important point is whether he thought the degree of force being used against Ms Kamio was unnecessary. Noone HAS suggested that it was necessary to cause serious injury to detain Leona Kamio, so if he thought that’s what was going on, then it wouldn’t matter who was doing it. The jury might agree he didn’t realise it was a police officer – the plan had always been to end matters and be arrested at that stage – hands up, go floppy, passively resist, not attack.
Mr Wainwright turned once more to the judge’s guidance, that common sense should apply when there are two people using force, sometimes both acting in what they think is self-defence. Sometimes one using force to detain a suspect, another using force to protect that person or themselves, and both acting lawfully. But it’s only Mr Corner on trial and the jury must consider it from his point of view, applying the burden and standard of proof to the evidence in his case, asking why he was acting that way. He says he was trying to protect a young woman. The jury have to determine whether the degree of force used was or may have been proportionate, but again they must decide this on the circumstances as Mr. Corner believed them to be.
The greater degree of force that someone believes is being used, or the more serious the injury someone believes is being caused or threatened, the greater the degree of force that is allowed in response. Mr. Corner doesn’t recall this exactly. He thought that this person was causing the pain that was making the female scream, but he can’t remember what assessment he made of the degree of pain. And although the law defines it in these linear steps and these definitions, the brain doesn’t work that way. You don’t think, oh well, that sounds like a three out of ten, so I’ll use a three out of ten in response. That’s a seven, so I’ll use maybe something between a six and an eight. It’s difficult to judge. You respond in the heat of the moment with the tools available to hand. Sam said he just had a feeling he had to do something to help.
Mr Wainwright again quoted the judge’s advice that if the jury decide that what the defendant did was in the heat of the moment when fine judgments are difficult, no more than the defendant genuinely believed was necessary, then that would be strong evidence that the force used was reasonable. And the Route To Verdict directs the jury to consider first of all whether there was ‘defence of another’ BEFORE determining whether Mr. Corner intended to cause grievous bodily harm or actual bodily harm, and in making that assessment no-one can be sure he was aiming for her spine. These sledgehammers are not easy to control, particularly if your vision is impaired. The jury cannot be sure Sam gave any thought to what level of force to use. They can’t be sure it crossed his mind there was a risk of injuring bone as opposed to perhaps just causing a bruise. That’s not unreasonable because we know that’s what happened to PC Buxton. Maybe he thought the bullet vest would protect her more than it did.
Mr Wainwright said the medical evidence itself was helpful, suggesting such injuries can be caused by low energy impact as well as high, by motor vehicle accidents or falls, without specifying the speed or the height. It says the force could be moderate or severe, and again with a range like that, Mr Wainwright reminded the jury that the burden of proof means they should conclude the force used was moderate. And force isn’t the same as energy. Was some of the force just gravity or momentum, rather than intention? And let’s not forget, from everything we know about Sam Corner from the evidence, he would never think to do that to someone.
The prosecution case hinges on this being a deliberate blow to the spine, intending to damage, possibly even to paralyse. Mr Wainwright asks the jury if they really think that’s what Samuel Corner intended? Applying the legal directions to the evidence leads, he suggests, to the conclusion that Sam’s actions were, or may have been, in the lawful defence of another and to a verdict of not guilty on Count 4.
Even if they don’t agree on that, if they’re sure this wasn’t defence of another, they should still take many of his points into account in deciding if Mr Corner intended to cause grievous bodily harm i.e. really serious harm. Ms Heer asked in her closing speech what else could he have intended? A question easy to ask in the cold light of day in a courtroom, but not easy to answer in the heat of the moment. Maybe he didn’t intend to do anything other than protect the person who was screaming.
Even if he didn’t think about it, didn’t form an intention, it doesn’t matter if he should have done, even if it was obvious he’d injure someone, in law he had to intend to cause really serious harm and that’s simply not the case.
In this case, the jury also have to decide whether ‘really serious harm’ was caused, and there isn’t a legal definition. Mr Wainwright wasn’t suggesting it wasn’t a nasty injury, but the difference between ‘really serious’ and ‘serious’ and ‘actual’ or ‘grievous’ is ultimately for the jury to decide. But he pointed out that ‘really serious’ doesn’t have to be permanent, but covers things like coma, loss of limbs or sight, organ damage or permanent disability.
The prosecution have said it was a fracture to the spine, a deliberate choice of words which although technically accurate, conjure up a break, a snapping of the spinal vertebrae. Maybe that’s what the jury had in mind until they saw the CT scan – it was actually an injury that wasn’t obvious. The doctors looking at the first X-rays didn’t identify any bone damage, nor in an MRI later.
The injury didn’t require surgery and Sergeant Evans was advised to take painkillers and do physiotherapy. The agreed facts state from medical evidence that you’d expect such a fracture to heal in six to twelve weeks, with full healing in three to six months, and no long-term consequences.
Mr Corner was criticised in cross-examination for not agreeing that it was grievous bodily harm, but Mr Wainwright reminded the jury he had raised an objection at the time, saying it was a cheap trick and pointing out that Sam (who takes things very literally and is concerned to be precise in his answers) couldn’t possibly decide. It’s a matter for the jury, even if the prosecution and defence agreed, different people would come up with different views.
Mr Wainwright, nearing the end of his speech, touched on the issue of the ‘no comment’ interview. As with the other defendants, Sam had been advised after being arrested on terrorist offences to make no comment. His silence shouldn’t be held against him. What he DID say is “I was trying to protect her.” The legal directions tell the jury that the prosecution suggest he may have made that up since – it’s nonsense.
—
Mr Wainwright concluded his speech with these words:
You may have seen recently that there are proposals to cut juries out of the vast majority of Crown Court trials. To have guilt or innocence determined by judges sitting alone. But you’ll be hard pressed to find any criminal barrister, prosecution OR defence, who supports that proposal. And I sincerely hope that at the end of your time as jurors, your experience of the jury system will be a positive one. That you will share our appreciation of the irreplaceable value that you bring and that you too would oppose the right to trial by jury being removed.
It is the only just and fair system for deciding guilt or innocence. That decision, that power, should not be in the hands of any one individual, because one person may not be properly representative of our society. There is a risk they may have a singular viewpoint, narrow experience, may bring conscious or unconscious bias and prejudice. These decisions should be made by the community, with your collective experience, common sense, integrity.
This isn’t the first time that this suggestion’s been made, removing juries, so perhaps the real question is why is it that from time to time those in power want to take away the right to trial by jury? And the reason may be that the jury system gives power to the people.
Power is not always given up easily. That right to trial by jury was hard fought. Skipping through the centuries, 400 years after Magna Carta, in the 17th century, there was the Star Chamber, which was presided over by the King and his ministers. As you can imagine, that was not particularly conducive to a fair trial. A historian noted that timid juries in that time never failed to second all the views of the Crown. And there scarcely occurred an instance that the sovereign or ministers were ever disappointed in the issue of a prosecution. Now, thankfully, that was abolished following the Civil War.
Even into the 20th century, there was perhaps indirect control exercised by limiting who sat on a jury. Those who made the laws wanted to make sure perhaps, that people who sat on juries looked and thought like them. Women weren’t allowed onto juries until 1919, and until 1971 jurors had to either be a property owner or a householder in a property worth a certain amount.
Those restrictions have been pushed back, and ensuring that the inferences that you draw, the facts that you find, and the verdicts you return, are for you alone to determine, has been a long struggle, but it remains a core and fundamental principle.
The prosecution, the state, must make you sure that these defendants are guilty. If the prosecution have done that, (and if not, why not) are matters for you and only you to decide. You, and only you, are the people to whom the verdict is entrusted. You cannot be asked the reasons behind your decision, as His Lordship directed you at the start of the trial. In fact, it would be a contempt of court to disclose that.
The role of the jury is not a rubber stamp. The role of the jury is quite the opposite. It is a protection against tyranny. It is a vital bulwark between the might of the state and the liberty of the individual. It is one of our essential checks and balances on which the legitimacy of the criminal justice system rests. And that hard-fought domain, that responsibility, that independence now falls to you.
That is what you must try to protect in accordance with your oath.
Sam Corner and I trust that you will do that, and have faith that in doing so you will reach the right, proper and just verdicts in this case.
The court took a short break before hearing from Leona Kamio’s barrister.
Closing defence speech by Ms Mira Hammad on behalf of Leona Kamio:
Who is Leona Kamio?
Well, she’s someone who really had nothing to do with the people of Palestine. The entirety of Gaza being wiped off the face of the earth would have made not a moment’s difference to her life. It wasn’t HER family who were going to live or die under Elbit’s drones. In other words, this is somebody who did what she did, for people that she will never meet, in a country she has never set foot in, who have a culture she doesn’t share, who speak a language that she doesn’t even speak.
Now, you’ll remember when she gave evidence, she told you that this story started, at least for her, in April 2024, when she was lying on her bed, scrolling through Instagram. And she sees this video of a grandfather hundreds of miles away, standing on the rubble of what used to be his home, with his family dead around him, and screaming into his phone “Please, if you’re watching this, help us. They’re killing us”.
And she took action. Now, the Crown call that having strong views. That’s not what it is. It’s compassion. It’s seeing the suffering of somebody else that you have no connection to, feeling their pain, so much so that you can’t live with yourself unless you do something about it. In other words, it’s the antithesis – it is the opposite of a willingness to hurt people.
And make no mistake, this case is all about who Ellie Kamio and the other defendants are, because the Crown’s case is that when you look into that dock, the six people that you see, the nursery worker, the charity worker, the university students, those six people who have no history of getting into trouble, no history of violence, never hurt anybody in their lives – they all got together, the six of them, in the light of day, and made a cold and calculated plan that they were willing to injure, to incapacitate another human being.
And then, say, the Crown, because this HAS to be true for their case to be true, they decided in advance to cover it up, to lie about it, because they’re saying that their stories matched up from the very beginning.
So that’s who the Crown is saying these people are, and they are saying that you can be sure of that. Not just that you can suspect it, or that that MIGHT be the case, or that it’s LIKELY to be the case, or that it’s PROBABLE that it was the case, VERY probable, HIGHLY probable, even that you are ALMOST SURE that it is the case. No, they are saying you can look into that dock, and you can be sure, the phrase used was “there is no room for doubt”, that that is who those people are.
Make no mistake, that is a very, very big allegation. And it doesn’t match up to reality. It is so far from the truth of the people that you have seen.
—
Ms Hammad went on to remind the jury of how Leona (“Ellie”) had told them prison was a ‘shit show’, but not to mistake that irreverence as a lack of caring. In character references her aunt had said she’d taught her to swear! And her boss at the nursery had described how her job was still open to her there as she was exceptional in her love and consideration for the children and someone who really cares about people and would never hurt anyone. The Crown say these defendants are intelligent people, not naïve, but Ms Hammad said intelligent people can be naïve, and Ellie looked at the situation in Gaza and thought she could do something about it – perhaps naïvely but also with hope.
In the character references a former work colleague described her belief in achieving dreams. Others wrote about her generous natural warmth and community spirit. Prosecutor Ms Heer paints Ellie and the others as violent liars, who were prepared to break the law. Ms Hammad asked whether if someone didn’t pay their TV licence it would point to them being a murderer? In the same way, she said, the fact Ellie was prepared to damage weapons that were going to hurt people doesn’t suggest she was prepared to harm people – in fact the opposite.
The whole prosecution case doesn’t really match the evidence, said Ms Hammad, pointing at their reliance on quite far-reaching inference and conclusions, very selective choice of evidence (even from their own witnesses), and some assertions not even backed by evidence.
The prosecution claimed the jury can be sure that this action was going to be very different to any previous Palestine Action protest and that the defendants knew that. Ms Heer had pointed to the level of organisation, the money invested in it and the use of a van to break in, but there was no evidence presented that these things were exceptional or that the defendants knew that. Ms Heer said that the training document showed no action that was more serious than criminal damage or burglary, but Ms Hammad asked the jury to look through it and see there’s one page about low-level actions, but also one on high-level actions, with damage under £5000, and damage over £5000 which would be tried in Crown courts. It DOES mention burglary – breaking in and smashing equipment – with a list of charges that would have applied in this case, without the allegations of violence.
The prosecution suggest a new approach was needed, because Elbit hadn’t been shut down. Ms Hammad reminded the jury that in fact the evidence showed that Ms Kamio knew there had been many serious actions before, so serious that they had forced Elbit premises to be closed down, and that as far as she knew, security guards hadn’t got involved. Police found an email on her laptop – the invitation to a training day, in which Palestine Action described the repeated actions at Elite KL in Tamworth (which made components for Israeli tanks), one causing more than £300,000 of damage, that eventually closed it down. And ALL those actions over four years hadn’t resulted in a single violent incident or the involvement of security guards. Why would Ellie think the Filton action would be any different?
Ms Hammad talked a bit about how much Ellie would have known about the action. The Crown had told the jury to ignore the ‘need to know’ rule, claiming the defendants knew a lot, and in relation to Ellie, pointed at her googling red boiler suits a couple of weeks before, and looking up ‘doing a recce’ a week before. Ms Hammad asks how much this really shows knowledge, especially as Ms Kamio’s unchallenged evidence was that she was looking up how to spell ‘recce’, simply because people had talked about it.
Ellie’s defence barrister also pointed out that there is not any evidence that any of the red team defendants’ devices accessed the Cryptpad planning document they’ve referred to. And the prosecution also rely on the documents they say were shown on a screen at the BnB. In fact, the defendants could have said they hadn’t seen that at all, and there wouldn’t be any evidence to the contrary, but they didn’t, so the prosecution is saying we can rely on the bit of evidence that helps them, but that Ellie is lying about the rest.
Ellie also admitted driving members of the black team to make a hole in the fence, even though there is no CCTV evidence to prove this, again Ms Hammad asked the jury to consider whether Ellie sounded like she was trying to hide her role, or telling the truth?
The Crown also alleged Ms Kamio must have known about the role of the black team, but all the equipment was packed in bags. In the van, each person was sitting in their own alcove, and in the 50 seconds between the black team jumping out, and the van hitting the shutter, they claim she would have seen those weapons. Ms Heer had shown the footage in slow motion several times – even then it was difficult to see weapons, let alone in the adrenaline-packed situation.
But even so, Ellie had told the court she’d seen someone with what looked like a length of rope in their hand, but that the first time she’d actually seen a whip was on the floor in the factory, and she assumed it was some Elbit thing.
Ms Heer had asked why Ellie hadn’t asked people about their roles when she was with them at the BnB. Ms Hammad described how paranoid activists are about undercover police, and it wouldn’t have gone down well if she’d asked such questions.
The Crown also rely on the Cryptpad documents which they say describes a plan for the black team to use violence, but Ms Hammad reminded the court that they’d accepted there’s no explicit reference to violence but suggested it was inferred and coded. The Crown had said that was because Palestine Action wouldn’t have wanted it to get out to police or public. In fact, whoever wrote that document included a list which mentioned BB guns – which of course were never used. Why would that be there if they were worried about police or public? The document also lists possible charges – again clearly not meant for police or public.
Although the Crown scoff the idea that the black team were meant to be a distraction, it’s there in the document at the start – “covert causing distraction while assisting overt to advance towards entry point”. Ms Hammad said the prosecution were again inviting speculation and inference.
While the Crown maintain the red team were planning to use violence, Ms Hammad asked the jury to read the plan carefully. It’s not until deep in, that it even mentions engaging with security, in a contingency plan saying the red team will try and go further into the factory and barricade themselves in, something which makes sense of the point that the police response time could be just 3 minutes. The plan, Ms Hammad suggested, was that there would be no engagement with security until the police themselves arrive, by which time the activists would be barricaded in. The Crown say there ‘must have been’ a plan to deal with security, but this again is, Ms Hammad suggests, just another assertion – a central one.
The barrister then turned to the evidence that the defendants knew they were going to be remanded, which the Crown said shows they were intending violence. In Ellie’s case, they relied on ‘Apple notes’ she’d made. Ms Hammad said that using Apple notes suggested there was no attempt at cover-up. They show she knew someone had been remanded for a month and so there were notes about vitamins and about cancelling subscriptions, but she only wrote half of a speech she’d planned if she were remanded. The evidence also shows notes Ellie wrote to her mum, indicating contingency plans depending on how long she was in custody, but suggesting she expected to be returning to work in September.
Ellie had also mentioned in court that she’d asked if there would be a problem over her DBS certificate and understood as long as the offence didn’t involve violence or dishonesty it would be OK. Ms Hammad said this showed she was not on her way with a plan to commit violent offences.
The prosecution have made much of the ‘no comment’ interviews, and Ms Hammad observed that it was recommended by Palestine Action, was the advice of a professional solicitor, and was backed up by Ellie’s personal experience and mistrust of the police, who we heard had beaten up her aunt. Over the course of interviews, five different solicitors told Ellie not to comment.
Turning to prosecution allegations that the defence were exploiting gaps in footage, Ms Hammad reminded the court that Ms Kamio had accused Mr Volante of aggressive behaviour in a defence statement back in April 2025, but none of the CCTV evidence was disclosed until July, so she wouldn’t have known there were gaps at that time. Ms Hammad said she herself didn’t know about gaps in the footage and why that was, until the start of this trial, and if the defence had been keen to exploit it, they wouldn’t be asking questions to locate it.
It was suspicious, she said, that the jury didn’t get a plan at the start with all of the missing cameras and an explanation. It wasn’t just odd cameras, but particular cameras covering the same certain areas – where Mr Luke appears (and doesn’t have BWV either), the area of the arrest where Mr Volante struck Mr Devlin (covered by police BWV but not by Elbit CCTV), and the alcove, where allegations have been made about Volante’s behaviour.
Ms Hammad reminded the jury that Mr Menon had suggested there were two explanations – either the police image recovery expert, Ms Grant, had overlooked pertinent footage and not downloaded it, or that she’d not been shown it. The barrister suggested the latter was more likely. Ms Grant had a list of 19 cameras in her notes, and it’s clear if she’d been shown the camera footage of the alcove, even with a slow frame rate it would have shown movements, and she would have downloaded it.
Ms Hammad referenced the cosy emails between Ms Grant and the Elbit contact, asking whether she would have even questioned them? Ms Grant couldn’t explain the Metropolitan Police evidence bags found in the Elbit safe, then she said it wasn’t evidence from the 6th August but other footage that was returned. But Ms Heer had read out a statement from Mr Mosely from when they went back to the factory. He said there was a USB stick there which was a copy of the footage given to the police. We don’t know who produced it or when, but it contains footage from the 12 cameras from the 6th August and was given to Elbit on the 8th August.
So there is a police investigation team accepting the word of a company that specialises in military technology and surveillance, that they had no idea how inadequate the system was. Ms Hammad reminded the jury that Ms Grant said Elbit employee ‘Witness Alpha’ claimed to be completely surprised at the shortcomings, a system so bad she hadn’t seen anything like it in ten years. She had accepted that, and accepted they couldn’t find a master password to the system, and then given them a nice copy of all the evidence they could keep in their safe. All this, said Ms Hammad, means that the jury can reject any suggestion that the defendants are exploiting anything.
Next, the barrister turned to the interactions with security, beginning by illustrating how the prosecution avoided inconvenient evidence. Mr Luke was adamant he hadn’t entered the factory before switching on his BWV. But the footage shows that what Ms Kamio said was true – he had entered, screaming. The prosecution compilation only begins with him backing away. Although Charlotte Head couldn’t remember this, she recognised the screaming was her, and Ellie says she saw Charlotte on the floor. She said she hadn’t seen Luke push Ms Head, but he was backing away. Ms Hammad suggested if Ms Kamio were making it up, she’d have made it better than that. She could also have said that’s when she broke her finger, but she didn’t. We know that what the Crown’s witness said was incorrect, so how can the jury be sure that what Ms Kamio says, backed by objective evidence, is not.
Similarly, Ms Heer’s summary of the interaction with Mr Shaw suggested that Ellie and the others were advancing towards him, but watching carefully it looks like he is approaching them with his umbrella raised, and Ellie backs away. Even Mr Shaw, under cross-examination by Mr Wainwright, said he “went in trying to bluff he had a stick or something, but they didn’t back down”. Ms Heer said Ellie made up that Mr Shaw’s face was angry and contorted because she knew we couldn’t see his face on the video, but given Mr Shaw’s own evidence, wasn’t it likely it was part of his “bluff”?
Ms Hammad also questioned Ms Heer’s assertion that Shaw shouted “Put it down”. On the footage he shouts something angrily, but Ms Kamio can’t remember what either.
Ms Heer suggests Kamio didn’t look scared, but rather confident and cocky. Ms Hammad suggests this is one of two normal ways to react when under attack – you either cry and run or you try to look not intimidated, and also points at her change when she sees that Mr Shaw is injured, even asking him if he was Welsh “in an attempt to connect with him”.
The prosecution claim she was holding the sledgehammer in a threatening way, but Ms Hammad asked the jury to recall when she showed them clips of Ellie holding the hammer in exactly the same way when no-one was nearby or threatening her – that’s just how she was holding it. The last observation in relation to Mr Shaw was Ellie’s comment to him that ‘it wasn’t worth his pay grade’, which the prosecution said was a threat, but they hadn’t asked Mr Shaw whether he felt threatened by it, and this was because it actually wasn’t threatening.
Re Mr Volante, Ms Hammad began by reminding the jury of the clip they’d seen when he was chasing the black team at the fence. She said his shouting “I’ll see you later. We’ll still be here” demonstrated he was enjoying it and up for a fight – the same person Ellie described in the alcove. The barrister reminded the jury that Mr Volante’s claim that Ellie had threatened him with an angle grinder in the alcove area was not backed up by any video evidence and he’d had to agree he could be wrong. Ms Hammad noted that the prosecution hadn’t invited the jury to no longer consider that a fact in their summary, saying it was indicative of a prosecution pursued with no sense of moderation. She also observed that the only person seen with an angle grinder is Mr Volante himself, in the alcove, with a sledgehammer in his other hand, and both Ms Kamio and Ms Rogers had said he was acting like a psychopath and they were scared because he was much bigger than them.
Ms Hammad painted a picture of what Ms Kamio was experiencing at this moment, when Mr Luke also entered the factory. She’s got the aggressive Volante in front of her. She’d seen Mr Luke possibly knock Charlotte to the ground. She suddenly thought of a quote that Elbit’s employees think of themselves as ‘civil soldiers’, and feared that Elbit may have told them to teach Palestine Action a lesson. At this point the prosecution say she swung her sledgehammer at Mr Luke, but Ms Hammad suggests she comes too close to him to actually swing, was again bluffing, and that he grabs the hammer. They then struggle over it and she falls to the ground. She admits she tries to kick him at this point because she is frightened he will use it if he grabs it off her, as she says Volante had done.
In the final interaction with Mr Volante he had been picking items up from the floor, and Ellie was frightened he would start using them again. Ms Hammad notes that she picked up the one thing that would protect her but not injure someone – the fire extinguisher spray.
As the police arrive, Ellie is once more doing what she came for, smashing equipment with the sledgehammer, but Volante comes running towards her, she turns (with hammer raised in mid action) and he grabs it. She then starts throwing things – the prosecution say she throws an object at PC Adam, but Ms Hammad suggests she was still trying to smash things on the ground and one item hits the officer on his left thigh, low down, at which point she is tasered.
The Crown claim she was wriggling around and resisting arrest, but Mr Hammad references the list of her injuries, the fact she was being turned over while the taser barbs were still in her arm, and that she’s being kneeled on. Ms Heer’s comments are also effectively irrelevant Ms Hammad points out, because Ellie is not charged with Obstructing a Police Officer, and under the circumstances her reactions were understandable.
The barrister said that other defence counsel had covered the indictments and the legal directions but she wanted to make some observations on the Route To Verdict.
Violent Disorder – Noting that the Crown suggest three ways to find that, and starting with the smashing of equipment in the factory, Ms Hammad suggests that a hypothetical bystander might wonder why the drones were there and why they were being smashed up, but wouldn’t necessarily be in fear for their own safety. Even the interactions with security have to be imagined for example like a drunk being thrown out of a pub – someone is trying to stop someone else doing something, and there’s a fight between them. Again, the bystander would not be scared themselves. The Crown also claim that because the red team arrived with the black team, they are all in the group of three or more, but Ms Hammad asks if you went to a pub with your friend and they went outside and began a fight and used unlawful violence, would you be responsible because you arrived together?
Ms Hammad then addressed the jury on their role, speaking about the power they’ve suddenly been given to make life-changing decisions in judgment of another. She urged them to analyse, to deliberate and to make sure they each have a voice, because there’s no taking back, no chance in years’ to come to think “I wish I hadn’t found those Palestine Action people guilty. I don’t think they were.”
—
Ms Hammad ended with these words:
It’s an extraordinary feature of our system that the final power is given to 12 ordinary people who can try to step into someone else’s shoes and see the world from their perspective. Empathy is not the same as emotion or sympathy, and it’s only by stepping into Ellie’s shoes that you can understand what was in her mind. You can understand why she did what she did. When you do that, you will understand that this is somebody who cares deeply about people. She came on the 6th of August to protect people, not to hurt them… That’s where the story that began with Ellie crying in her bed took her, to the 6th of August, where she acted to help people. There are parts of the story that have come since, that Ellie didn’t anticipate. She didn’t think she was going to spend the next year and a half of her life on remand, but she did know that she would end up here in front of you and waiting to be judged. And now the time has come for you to do that. Find her Not Guilty, members of the jury.
Closing defence statement by Catherine Oborne on behalf of Fatema Zainab Rajwani
Fatima Zainab Rajwani was 20 years old and one day when that prison van smashed through the shutters of the Elbit Systems building.
Inside that building, she didn’t strike a single person with a sledgehammer. She didn’t swing her sledgehammer at a single person. She didn’t hit a single person with a single object. She didn’t swing any object at any person. She didn’t hurt a single person. She didn’t injure a single person. She didn’t incapacitate a single person. She didn’t have a single physical interaction with any person.
The prosecution do not suggest that she herself did any of those things.
She was the first to surrender. You can see her on the footage with her hands up when the police arrive. She lay down on the floor where Mr Volante shouted at her and told her to do so, and she stayed there until she was arrested. When Mr Corner struck Police Constable Buxton and Police Sergeant Evans with a sledgehammer, she was lying face down on the floor, unable to see what was going on, and not doing anything. When she was arrested, she walked out of that factory in a calm and compliant manner.
I could stop there – obviously I won’t – but if you doze off this afternoon and you remember nothing else about what I have to say, please just remember what I have just said. Because that is the fundamental basis upon which I suggest you should find her not guilty of Count 1, aggravated burglary, and of Count 3, violent disorder.
—
After this powerful opening statement, Ms Oborne said she would concentrate on the most serious charge, Aggravated Burglary. Referencing the judge’s legal directions, she said that the prosecution must prove, so that the jury members are sure, that when she went through the shutters of the Elbit building, she had a sledgehammer and intended to hurt someone with it. A person is guilty of aggravated burglary, if they enter a building without permission, with intent to damage property, and they have with them a weapon of offence.
Ms Oborne explained that ‘weapon of offence’ has a particular legal meaning – that at the time of entry, the article was intended to be used to hurt someone. It’s not even enough if it’s intended to frighten someone. All agree the sledgehammers were to be used to damage property, but if there was also an intention to use them as weapons should the need arise, then that would be enough. However, if the defendants formed the intention later, due to circumstances, that would not be enough.
Ms Oborne said the prosecution has to prove a very precise intent at a precise time, and that she wanted to make three comments on that. First, that if Fatema Zainab HAD intended to injure the security guards or police officers, then why didn’t she, or at least try to? She was in the factory for around 20 minutes and didn’t swing the sledgehammer or even use anything else to try and hurt anyone.
The barrister showed the jury each incident on the CCTV compilation. When Mr Luke first enters, Fatema Zainab isn’t anywhere near – she’s off smashing equipment, which was her plan. In the incident between Mr Volante and Mr Devlin and Ms Rogers, she’s not there, still damaging property as per her plan. The next incident is with Mr Shaw, Mr Corner, Ms Kamio and Ms Head – again Fatema Zainab is away damaging property. In the interaction between Volante and Mr Devlin, Ms Rogers and Ms Kamio, she’s STILL away, damaging property.
Ms Oborne then takes the jury to the one occasion, on Mr Luke’s BWV footage, when Ms Rajwani is seen shouting at him. After playing through more than a minute of this footage, Ms Oborne comments that over that period Ms Rajwani never swears at Mr Luke and doesn’t swing a sledgehammer at him. In a series of selected stills, Ms Oborne shows that Fatema Zainab is never nearer to Mr Luke than several feet and appears to be for the most part retreating, which she suggests is because Ms Rajwani didn’t want any interaction with security because it was never part of the plan.
The prosecution say that Fatema Zainab passes a sledgehammer to Charlotte Head during the interaction with Mr Luke, but Ms Oborne says this is just an inference, because there is no footage of the exchange – the prosecution rely only on the fact that Ms Rajwani is seen with the hammer, and a few seconds later Ms Head appears to have one. No witness has claimed this is what happened, there’s no footage of it. On the face of it it’s just as likely Ms Rajwani dropped the hammer and then Ms Head picked it up. Ms Oborne described it as a theory the prosecution had, that they weren’t even confident enough to put this to Ms Rajwani in the witness stand. She adds that if we had the footage from the missing cameras, covering that area, it might clear the matter up.
However, as per the judge’s legal directions, she quoted “in considering the evidence against each of the defendants, you can draw such conclusions as you consider safe and reliable, but you must not guess or speculate”. Ms Oborne’s final comment on this element was to ask, even if Fatema Zainab did pass the sledgehammer over, so what? Ms Rogers didn’t do anything with it. She just stood there with it over her arm.
Ms Rajwani then lit a green smoke flare, not a firework, and she didn’t point it at anyone – all it does is release a cloud of green smoke, which can’t injure or hurt anyone, and from then on she is never seen with a sledgehammer again.
Moving on to when the police arrive, Ms Oborne showed a slide of the moment Fatema Zainab held her arms up in the air in a surrender position, consistent with what she’d told the jury, that the whole thing had not gone according to plan and she just wanted it to be over quickly. Terrified, she lies face down, as told.
The footage also shows that Mr Luke wanders off and for some time Fatema Zainab remains lying, with no-one supervising her, not handcuffed, and with a sledgehammer in reach. If she’d wanted to she could have got up and hurt or injured someone arresting one of her colleagues, if that was the plan. But instead she waits to be handcuffed, complies, and walks out of the building. These were all the actions of someone not guilty of Count 1, said Ms Oborne.
Before continuing with other points, Ms Oborne responded to another of the prosecution’s claims, that if the defendants had just intended to smash property, but the sledgehammers were too unwieldy, why hadn’t they taken another type of tool? Ms Oborne observed that if the hammers were too heavy to damage equipment, then surely they were too heavy to damage people. Fatema Zainab did end up ditching the sledgehammer and used a crowbar instead, as seen on GoPro footage, because she wanted to cause as much damage as possible.
Ms Oborne then spoke about how aware Fatema Zainab had been (or not) of what was going on. There are three incidents in the trial that the prosecution point to. The first was whatever happened with Mr Shaw out in the car park. Clearly Ms Rajwani was nowhere near that and knew nothing about it. She also didn’t interact with Mr Shaw in the building so had no knowledge that he was bleeding.
When Mr Corner struck the police officers, Fatema Zainab was on the ground, face down, after being screamed at by Mr Volante. Ms Oborne played the relevant footage to the jury to confirm this.
Fatema Zainab was still on the ground when she recorded the short GoPro piece for social media, and had no idea that any member of security staff had been injured, let alone struck with a sledgehammer. Ms Oborne said the clip could be viewed as a comment they’d achieved the objective of breaking into the Elbit factory and doing as much damage as possible, but not as the prosecution suggest as a boast about violence taking place, and Fatema Zainab told the court had she known then what she knows now, she wouldn’t have made that comment.
Ms Oborne’s third point was about Fatema Zainab’s age, just a day past 20 at the action, still a student at Goldsmiths, living with her parents. She warned the jury not to judge her by their own standards. Perhaps she was naïve to believe she would do some damage to property and go home with a slap on the wrists, but she’d seen that happen to others.
Was she expecting to be remanded into custody for 16 months, separated from her much loved family, missing out on finishing her degree, not graduating with her friends, arrested under terrorism legislation, and tried for aggravated burglary? Of course not. Was the action meticulously planned, including the use of violence? No, it was an action that went wrong. It went wrong from when Mr Shaw was injured, to when Ms Evans was struck with a sledgehammer. Ms Rajwani said this herself – she was clear to the organisers there should be no weapons or violence.
The prosecution speech claimed that Ms Rajwani had rejected the possibility she’d been misled by Palestine Action, but Ms Oborne read out her actual answers under cross-examination, which said that she didn’t know what they’d set out to do, and felt a little bit deceived, but that she knew every action before this had been the same, in terms of bail.
She said if she’d known the black team were bringing axes and whips she would have dropped out.
Ms Oborne showed the jury a slide of evidence seized, pointing out that all the red team were first time actionists, and had actually brought drinks and sandwiches, hardly a sign they expected immediate confrontation with security guards. Perhaps this was naïve, but they had no collective experience of Palestine Action demonstrations and had been told what had happened before. They relied on what organisers had told them (on a ‘need to know’ basis). Organisers, Ms Oborne said, hadn’t screened for the young people or neuro-diverse people in the action, and had only told them to ‘brace’ when smashing through the fence in the van. No wonder the action went wrong, she said.
The barrister paused to mention the planning documents once more, that the prosecution so heavily rely on, claiming they showed what the defendants intended to do, and she asked where does it say sledgehammers would be used to hurt people? Nowhere.
The prosecution say there is no explicit mention of violence or weapons because Palestine Action wouldn’t want it to get out to the police or public, but these documents were highly encrypted and password-protected – not intended to see the light of day. Even so there’s no mention of violence with weapons, and there is also very little planning for inside the factory. It’s all about the break-in.
Ms Oborne reminded the jury that when you are 20 years old, there’s a lot less common sense, but the prosecution rely on it when they say surely they’d have known they’d be stopped by security, surely they’d have asked the organisers more questions, and so on. She asked the jury to think about the silly things they’d done when they were 20, that they’d never dream of doing now.
Ms Oborne spoke for a while about Ms Rajwani personally, reminding the jury of her university studies and work. When she’d been asked why she signed up to a high-level arrestable action she said she wanted to do something that counted and be accountable for it. She spoke about hating the violence she saw on her phone every day, and wanted to do something tangible. The prosecution said that her views were so strong that she was prepared to go further than property damage and injure people if necessary, but this would have gone against the purpose of her action in the first place.
Ms Oborne said that the prosecution had reserved their harshest and toughest cross-examination for Fatema Zainab, and suggested it might have been because she didn’t actually do anything – they even admitted that they weren’t suggesting she used a sledgehammer herself against anyone. Fatema Zainab told the jury what she thought the plan was – to shout at the security guards and cause a distraction. And what did she do? Nothing more or less. She shouted at Mr Luke to get out, she lit a flare as a distraction, and then she went off to smash up drones.
The barrister quoted the prosecution telling the jury what they could have done instead of using force. They could have held up their hands. Fatema Zainab did. They could have gone somewhere else and damaged property. Fatema Zainab did. The prosecution’s problem with Ms Rajwani is that she just stuck to the plan. She’s actually the proof of the plan. The jury, said Ms Oborne, will have to decide if Fatema Zainab stood up to scrutiny under extremely thorough cross-examination from one of the top prosecution King’s Counsels in the country.
With reference to Ms Rajwani’s ‘no comment’ interview, Ms Osborne said there were two matters the prosecution highlighted – that Fatema Zainab hadn’t mentioned she didn’t expect security get involved, and she didn’t know the black team had whips and axes, but everything she said in her witness statement, was consistent with what she said in the witness box, and she DID say she was scared when the security guards arrived, AND she said she didn’t see anyone use whips or fireworks. As with the others, she’d been arrested under terrorism powers and followed the advice of her solicitor.
The prosecution also point to Ms Rajwani not trying to get hold of her livestreamed footage, but like Mr Corner, how is she supposed to contact people from prison, who might be under investigation themselves? She DID provide the police with the PIN number of the phone used to stream (again taking the advice of her solicitor).
Turning to the charge of violent disorder, Ms Oborne read out the judge’s full legal direction and definition of the offence and then looked again at the Route To Verdict. The key issues are whether Ms Rajwani intentionally used or encouraged unlawful violence, and whether a person of reasonable firmness would have feared for their safety. Violence can include violence to property, and there’s clearly no dispute that Fatema Zainab intentionally damaged property, but Ms Oborne suggested the hypothetical observer would not have feared for their safety.
The Crown accepts Ms Rajwani didn’t use any violence against anyone, so the question is whether she intentionally encouraged anyone to. Ms Oborne said the evidence shows the opposite. The only physical interaction Fatema Zainab was involved in was when she shouted at Mr Luke to get out, and then backs away and lights a flare to cause a distraction and then goes away to damage more property. The barrister suggested this could not be considered encouragement of violence, but if the jury think otherwise, they should also consider whether it was in defence of another, reminding them that when she lit the flare, she’d just seen Ms Kamio on the floor, grappling with Mr Shaw.
The other charge is of course criminal damage, and Ms Oborne reminded the jury they must follow the judge’s directions to the letter, she wouldn’t suggest otherwise, and they should, on the facts find Fatema Zainab not guilty on the counts of Aggravated Burglary and Violent Disorder, but she wanted to make this point:
There is a bitter irony at the heart of Count 2, and it will not have escaped any of your notice. We live in a topsy-turvy world, a world with so-called world leaders who act disgracefully and illegally, while other so-called world leaders say nothing. And sometimes ordinary and decent people try to take action, direct action, to oppose them. But that’s the world we live in. The small fish get the full force of the law. The big fish get nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
In conclusion, Ms Oborne reminded the jury that the prosecution must make them sure of guilt, and the defendants are entitled to the benefit of ANY reasonable doubt they may have in the jury room. Each defendant, and each count, must be considered separately, and in the case of Ms Rajwani, who never swung a sledgehammer or any other object at anyone, the prosecution had not come close to making the jury sure. For that reason they should find her not guilty.
After a long and wordy day, the jury were sent away for the weekend with the usual instruction not to think or speak about the case outside the court. On Monday we’ll hear the last two defence speeches and final summary and directions from Mr Justice Johnson.
The judge also asked the jury to ignore the protesters outside the court. We had heard drums, chanting and speeches throughout the afternoon from inside the courtroom.
Monday 12th January (Week 7)
Closing Speech by Audrey Mogan on behalf of Zoe Rogers
Ms Mogan began by reminding the jury that they were there to bring their varied life experiences to bear on the evidence, and that they must be sure that the prosecution had proved their case on each count, and for each defendant, before bringing any guilty verdicts. To illustrate that “maybe”, “probably” or “likely” is not enough, and with reference to her Canadian background, she asked the jury to imagine walking through a forest with a child, a grandchild or niece or nephew, and coming upon a beautiful frozen lake. Would they let that child walk on the ice if they thought it would probably take their weight? No, they would have to be sure – and this is the level of certainty the jury need to apply to Ms Zoe Roger’s case.
Beginning with the charge of Aggravated Burglary, and referencing Question 1.3 in the Route To Verdict, Ms Mogan asked whether the jury were sure that when Zoe entered the Elbit building, before any interaction with Mr Volante and before Mr Shaw ran in with his umbrella raised, she had a sledgehammer with her ‘in order to hurt or incapacitate them if the need arose’. The barrister asked the jury to look at the photograph taken of the six defendants just before the action, with the number of a solicitor written on Zoe’s arm, and asked if they had an intention to injure or incapacitate another human being.
Not a caution or conviction among them, and all of good character, on their first action with Palestine Action. Two nursery school teachers, a Maths Olympics Oxford graduate, a domestic violence worker and Zoe, just 20 years old, weighing 45 kilogrammes, recently out of hospital with an ankle injury, wearing out-of-date spectacles. Zoe who studied on her own and passed A-levels when her mental health made school difficult, and worked as a kitchen porter and in a soup kitchen and volunteered at church. Zoe who cried about the Palestinian refugee camps attacked by Israel. Zoe who went to the factory to destroy the drones that drop grenades and destroy lives. Zoe who didn’t buy any tools, didn’t pack equipment in bags, and was with people she’d only met recently. Zoe who used her own phone and email address, who wore a red boiler suit, and wore no face covering. Zoe who was calm and compliant on arrest. The prosecution, said Ms Mogan, have to make the jury sure that she intended to injure or incapacitate another human being, and this just flies in the face of the evidence and who Zoe Rogers is.
The prosecution, Ms Mogan went on, suggested that they were quick to use the sledgehammers on security when challenged, and that this proved their intent – but did they? Did Zoe confront Volante or did he run in screaming and rush at Mr Devlin? The prosecution also say that they chose hammers because of their intent to injure, but these things are heavy, and on the footage, when Zoe tries to swing one, she’s turned through 360º. Even Volante , in his evidence, called her incompetent in handling it, in contrast to the way he handled it. She could barely get it out of her bag. And when she finally got around to breaking a drone, she said she held it above her head and let it fall. Ms Mogan asks whether, if you were really intent, even conditionally, on injuring someone, you would take something you could barely carry?
The prosecution also rely on the notes about prison that Zoe took to the action. Ms Mogan reminded the jury that Zoe had been told by Palestine Action she wouldn’t be remanded. Zoe had told the jury she believed it would be very unlikely because of her previous good character, and she’d only heard of one person, an Israeli dissident, held for a short while and then bailed. The prosecution claim that Zoe knew prison was likely because of the offences she was going to commit, because she’d accessed documents about preparing for prison, and had made notes on them. Zoe had said she was very anxious about the action in general, and making notes seemed productive and calming, and she became interested too. Ms Mogan suggested that none of us know what it’s like to go to prison, and if there were the remotest chance we’d be spending even one day there, we might want to know everything we possibly could about it.
Ms Mogan asked the jury to look again at the photo, and consider that who Zoe is has remained unchallenged by the prosecution – the idea that she went in to that building intending to injure or incapacitate another human being is a joke.
On the charge of violent disorder, Ms Mogan reminded the court of what Mr Menon had already said about it – about three individuals having to be present together – and she asked the jury to be careful about that when watching the footage of Zoe Rogers.
In the interaction with Mr Shaw, it’s just her and Sam Corner – she doesn’t even shout at Mr Shaw but asks him if he’s OK and tells him to come with her. Ms Mogan says she can’t even remember whether the prosecution mentioned it in their closing speech.
The first interaction with Mr Volante was just her and Mr Devlin, until right at the end when she’s told the jury she ended up on the floor. Ms Mogan reminds the jury that Mr Volante’s BWV footage appears to end just as her knees are seen buckling. She also reminds the jury that the prosecution barrister Emma Gargitter asked Mr Luke how many people he saw, and he replied, first one female, and then four people at the same time. Ms Rogers was still trying to get stuff out of her backpack. Mr Luke never identifies her.
In fact, suggests Ms Mogan, the only time Zoe is present with at least two others and near a guard, is in the final interaction with Volante, where she is behind Ms Kamio and Mr Devlin. The prosecution say she swung her sledgehammer at him twice and followed him round the warehouse with the other two, but Ms Mogan refers to point 3.2 in the Route To Verdict: “Are you sure the defendant and at least two others used or threatened unlawful violence (that is violence that was not in self-defence or defence of another)?”
Ms Mogan reminds the jury of the child at the ice lake and tells them they have to be sure that Zoe is not acting in self-defence or defence of another. She was late out of the van, can hardly get the sledgehammer out, loses her glasses for a moment, and despite being told over and over that security would not intervene, she sees Mr Luke in the distance. By the time that she’s trying to help put the pallet up against a door, she has still never used her sledgehammer. But then Mr Volante arrives.
Ms Mogan pauses to play the jury a montage of clips of Angelo Volante. The prosecution had described him as “assertive”, but Zoe’s only been there a few minutes, has hardly done a thing other than help with the pallet, and is confronted by Volante, screaming, with whip in hand (originally edited out of police footage), sticking his tongue out aggressively at Zoe, and rushing at Jordan Devlin, who has nothing in his hands. Ms Rogers had described him as terrifying. Ms Mogan asks the jury to consider whether that’s any exaggeration.
In evidence Mr Volante claimed he’d run at Mr Devlin because he had a sledgehammer, but the video evidence actually shows him running at an unarmed man, right in front of Zoe. Ms Mogan says that Volante kicked out at Jordan, then turned his sights on Zoe and approaches her with sledgehammer in hand bringing it down towards her head. The footage shows she is clearly terrified and the barrister tells the jury that all her actions from that point onwards have to be viewed in that context. Even Volante said her handling of the sledgehammer is incompetent and it was too heavy for her, when she’s swinging it in front of her to keep him away. He claimed it brushed his hand, but accepted he’d told the police in his first statement that it hadn’t touched him. Ms Mogan repeated the Route To Verdict point 3.2 that before moving on, the jury had to be sure that Zoe was not acting in self-defence.
The prosecution had described Filton as Elbit’s highest-secured R&D facility, undermining the suggestion that security weren’t expected to get involved, but Ms Mogan reminded the jury that Mr Shaw and others had confirmed to the court that there were normally only three guards on duty, with one extra that night because of the discovery of the hole in the fence. Zoe had been told by organisers that security was light, that they wouldn’t intervene, and that they would just call the police. And Ms Mogan asked the jury to look at social media photos that Zoe had researched, showing activists on rooftops, some with Palestinian flags, with signs, some lock-ons and so on, and an image of someone being carried out by police.
The prosecution have said that this action was going to be different and that violence was planned. They turn to planning documents to suggest this, but Ms Mogan echoed what defence barrister Ms Hammad had noted earlier – the prosecution have no evidence Zoe accessed the Cryptpad except for three prison documents on one day, and none that anyone else in the red team accessed them at all.
All the evidence of a preliminary meeting Zoe joined, a second meeting she joined when she hadn’t heard back, the training day, the Signal chats and meetings, the presentation at the BnB, and the private meeting of the red team – it’s all been volunteered by Zoe and the other defendants. Zoe also spoke about ‘de-arresting’, a common non-violent tactic in protest circles that can include pulling an arrestee back, but never any physical interaction with the person arresting. She also mentioned the phrase “Enter with vengeance” that she’d seen, thinking it was a bit of a joke. The prosecution didn’t have any of this evidence Ms Mogan said – it had all been told to them and to the jury, because Zoe was telling the truth. And yet the prosecution suggest that the jury can rely on all of that, but ignore everything else, because the defendants are liars.
On the charge of Violent Disorder, the Crown say that the red team knew about the black team, even though Zoe says she didn’t know about whips or skewers, about fireworks, or about the term “High Level ++”.
The Palestine Action documents reference a ‘need to know basis’, and in fact Zoe didn’t know where the BnB was until she arrived in Bristol, she’d never heard anyone speak about ‘weapons’, and other than the discussion about an angle grinder to cut through shutters, and shears in case it failed, at the BnB she didn’t see any tools. She was never in the ‘Ninjas’ Signal group (and why would a Ninja wear a bright red outfit?)
The prosecution say Ms Rogers knew what the black team were doing and that the jury can consider them as ‘all together’, but Ms Mogan reminded the court about Mr Shaw’s car. We’d heard how in the car park it had been daubed with red paint and dented, but Zoe wasn’t asked anything about that. Clearly some things had happened “off-piste”, but Zoe hasn’t been held accountable for that. So, the barrister concluded, the jury cannot get past Q 3.2 on Violent Disorder.
But, if they do decide to go further, Ms Mogan said that several defence counsel had already dealt with the issue of ‘a hypothetical bystander of reasonable firmness’, but she’d add that there were Palestinian flags draped around, signifying that it was a protest, and she asked the jury who would they be most scared of, Zoe Rogers or Angelo Volante?
In considering both Aggravated Burglary and Violent Disorder, Ms Mogan made one more point. Miss Rogers had told the court that she went into that factory to break drones – drones used against Palestinians in Gaza. Drones used to drop grenades and take life. She’d not only learned about the history of Palestine, not only was she acutely aware of the horrors taking place daily, but she’d also done research into Elbit as a manufacturer of weapons to be used against Palestinians. The prosecution accept this was the whole point of the action. So, the barrister asked, if this was her intent, that she was going in prepared for security to intervene and ready to injure and incapacitate and threaten them with her sledgehammer if they tried to stop her, then why did she do nothing for most of the time she’s there? She doesn’t use the sledgehammer on drones until way after the interactions. It’s because she was taken by surprise, shocked and frightened, and everyone can see it. She’s telling the truth.
In relation to the ‘no comment’ issue, the prosecution say that Ms Rogers now relies on two things that she didn’t mention in her interview and prepared statement – that she didn’t expect the guards to intervene, and that she didn’t know the black team had whips or axes. Ms Mogan reads the prepared statement again to the jury: “I wish to say I had no intention of harming anybody at any point. I did not use serious violence, I did not wish any violence to be used against anybody. At no point did I want anyone to get hurt. I did not carry any weapon. I did not intend to use any sledgehammer as a weapon or to cause injury. I did not believe that anyone was in possession of incapacitant spray or that they used it. I did not see anyone use whips or fireworks against any security guards. I was scared throughout the time I was in the warehouse, but particularly when the security guards came in.”
The prosecution rely on this, and the legal direction suggests that ‘she didn’t really have an answer to this and is just telling you it now’. But she has told the jury she was frightened, she hadn’t slept before the action, nor in the police cells, and was interviewed by counter-terrorism police 17 hours later, in her words, ‘the worst of worst possible scenarios’. She didn’t even write the statement herself, but took the solicitor’s advice, read it and signed it and used her right to remain silent. She has nothing to prove or disprove, but has made the key points clear from the start. She didn’t carry a weapon, and was scared throughout, especially when security guards came in.
Ms Mogan asked the jury to imagine how hard it is to walk to the witness stand, and repeated that Zoe really had nothing to prove or disprove, but under robust cross-examination had said over and over again she was never intending to harm anyone and was frightened. But the prosecution are clutching on to these two points like straws, and they have to, because she has no previous convictions or cautions, and has never been arrested before, which the jury have been directed they can take into account and decide it’s less likely she committed these offences. And it also supports her credibility. So the prosecution, to prove their case so that the jury is sure, are saying that everything this principled young woman has told the jury, under oath, was her lying to them, to their faces.
Nearing the end of her speech, Ms Mogan reminded the jury that Ms Heer had suggested Ms Rogers had got involved in direct action in order to stop Elbit’s weapons going to Israel, but had quickly concluded that lawful protest was a waste of time. But Zoe, who was concerned about climate change, had taught herself A-level maths and biology, and then started studying Humanities and Social Sciences, because she realised it doesn’t matter how much we know about the science if we don’t have the political will. She wanted to know how the world worked, and she studied academic problem-solving. She worked in a soup kitchen and learnt about Palestine, attending marches and protests and dragging her friends along, designing a QR sticker for Amnesty International, to connect to information about Israel’s apartheid and occupation. She went on the UK’s second biggest ever march of half a million people, and wrote to her MP, pleading with him to call for a ceasefire, stop weapons sales and uphold international law.
And when all that still failed to protect Palestinian people from genocide, she finally decided to take direct action. Someone so young – deeds, not words.
Ms Mogan ended with these words:
Members of the jury, in conclusion, have the prosecution made you sure of each and every element, on each and every count that Zoe Rogers faces on the indictment? Not maybes, probabilities, not likelies – all of that means that you’re not sure.
No one will ever ask you for your reasons. That is solely a matter for you. No one is allowed to ask you for your reasons.
Think carefully about Zoe Rogers. Described as an extraordinary person, gifted, courageous and loving, she might be the bravest and most selfless person I know. Considerate and thoughtful, kind, caring and gentle towards all those around her, with a passion for social justice and building a better world.
Zoe is without a doubt the most peaceful and unproblematic person that I’ve ever known. Everybody deserves a Zoe in their life. She’s the very best of all of us.
Members of the jury, there are no do-overs. The time to act is now. Have the prosecution made you sure, that Zoe Rogers threatened and intimidated others, that she wasn’t terrified? Have the prosecution made you sure that she attended that Elbit factory intending to injure or incapacitate another human being?
Maybe it’s best said in her own words instead of mine from the poem she wrote, Lost in Prison: “I said it was about the children when they asked why I did it and it was love not hate that called me.”
The only true verdict to return would be one of not guilty on these counts. Thank you.
Monday 12th January 2026
Defence Solicitor-Advocate Andrew Morris on behalf of Jordan Devlin
Mr Morris began his speech by reminding the jury of the burden of proof. He said it was particularly important in Jordan’s case because of his decision not to give evidence in the trial. Mr Morris told the jury that Jordan didn’t have to prove anything, he didn’t need to answer questions to the police (although he did make a prepared statement), didn’t need to give evidence, didn’t need to call witnesses, and didn’t need character witnesses (although the jury did hear several of those before the holiday break).
Mr Morris said that everything was crystal clear on the CCTV footage, and the jury should draw no adverse inference from his silence, i.e. that he didn’t have answers to questions, because all the answers are in that video evidence.
The lawyer referenced the judge’s remark that the jury would be “unlikely to be troubled” with one of the issues in the case, but reminded them that in the judge’s legal directions he had also said “if you think that I’m expressing any view about a piece of evidence or about the case, you are free to agree or disagree”. Mr Morris said that on the issue of criminal damage, all the issues are there for them to decide, and nothing has been removed because Mr Devlin didn’t give evidence.
The prosecution appear to accept Jordan caused no criminal damage – there’s no evidence that he did – and the burden of proof is on the prosecution to prove his intent. Lead prosecutor Ms Heer had described all the defendants as thoughtful and intelligent, but added perhaps unfairly, “at least the ones you’ve heard give evidence”.
Mr Morris reminded the jury of some of the comments in the character witness statements, which described Jordan, aged 30, who grew up in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, as calm, courteous and respectful of others, even in disagreement. His co-worker said he was compassionate rather than confrontational. A long-time friend who worked with him at a youth centre said he was a pacifist.
An ex-partner said he never behaved with malice, and was always kind. Another friend said he was always against conflict, giving an example of him de-escalating a fight between two individuals. Mr Morris repeated what Zoe Rogers had said, that Jordan stepped in to protect her. The friend described how Jordan used humour to de-escalate, and Mr Morris pointed at Mr Volante’s evidence that Jordan had described the situation in the factory as a ‘Star Wars moment’ – an attempt to be jokey and light-hearted even then.
Another ex-partner’s character statement said Jordan was a passionate advocate for justice, with a strong moral compass, always kind and gentle, never known to be violent, and more likely to de-escalate a violent situation than cause one.
These were all people who had known Jordan a long time, said Mr Morris, and it’s no coincidence that that’s how he behaved in the footage. The prosecution say the jury should hold it against him that he hasn’t given evidence, but he was the person that in the footage, you see telling the police he has been assaulted.
The clip is played to the jury, and Mr Devlin is heard alleging he was assaulted by Mr Volante.
At the police station, the caution, as per usual, included the words “anything you do say may be given in evidence”, and that’s what he did, he made a prepared statement: “In relation to the incident of the 6th of August, I wish to make it clear that there was never any intention on my part to use violence, serious or otherwise, against any person. I did not intend that any person should do so at any point. I did not carry a weapon. I did not see anyone carrying incapacitant spray. I do not believe that anyone was in possession of anything like this. I did not see anyone use whips or fireworks against security guards or police.” So he has stated his intention, and he has addressed the issue of the black team outside.
The statement continues, “I was placed in a chokehold by a security guard who also tried to bite my neck”. Mr Morris paused to remind the jury they’d seen footage of the chokehold, but it was up to them to decide on the credibility of Mr Volante, who denied trying to bite anyone.
The statement also describes “a number of injuries to my body”, which the jury have seen in evidence – a body map of various injuries. “These were caused when I was challenged by the security guard who was carrying a sledgehammer at the time”. Again, the footage shows Mr Volante strike close to Jordan’s neck with the handle of the sledgehammer.
Mr Morris asks the jury who is credible? Whose account is believable? Although he hasn’t given evidence at the trial, his prepared statement is highly credible. He was taken to hospital, and there’s evidence his bruises grew and he developed a black eye.
The lawyer lists five incidents that Mr Devlin was involved in. First when Mr Volante comes in with the whip and approaches Zoe Rogers, then there’s an incident in the alcove where Mr Devlin is mostly alone and not in a group of two or more people – the same with Ms Rogers, just the two of them, not three. Then there’s the incident where Mr Devlin is seen to be guiding Mr Volante out of the factory floor. And then the moment when Mr. Volante hits Mr. Devlin with a hammer near his neck area, and then there’s the chokehold incident at the end, which the prosecution addressed you about, in their speech.
Mr Morris suggests these incidents tell the jury everything they need to know about Mr Volante, his credibility and his behaviour. The prosecution barrister, Ms Heer, told the jury that the security guards were ‘completely unarmed’, but Mr Morris suggests the incident of the sledgehammer handle to Mr Devlin’s neck is of critical importance and may affect the jury’s decision about every defendant. He reminds them of the judge’s legal direction about the use of reasonable force by the security guard, quoting “in considering these issues, you will need to take into account that the defendants knew they were on Elbit’s premises as trespassers, and that the security guards were entitled to use reasonable force to stop the defendants damaging property and to require them to leave”.
Mr Morris tells the jury it’s up to them to decide if Mr Volante used reasonable force or went over the top. If the latter, then he assaulted Mr Devlin, which is quite a serious matter. But Mr Volante didn’t mention it in his witness statement, made the next day. There’s no real explanation other than it was a serious incident and he didn’t want to engage with it. How does that affect his credibility?
And there seems to be a collective amnesia amongst all the witnesses over it. No-one went back and asked him about it. The allegation was made to PC Adams, and when Mr Devlin says it, Mr Volante doesn’t deny it. He doesn’t say he was in fear of his life. And which incident is it anyway? Mr Devlin had several injuries. PC Buxton was close by, but he didn’t mention it in his statement either, nor go back and ask Mr Volante about it.
When Ms Heer asked Volante about it in the witness stand, he said he used the handle to get to another individual, to disarm them, after that there was “a direction of the hammer towards myself – I proceeded to try and get the other hammer – I think it’s in the hands of the male”. When the clip was played to him again, he said “I had moved forward, looking at the sledgehammer, on the floor next to the Scottish male – I have a sledgehammer in my hand – I am holding the sledgehammer in such a way, the one hand close to head, and the other hand at the far end, not in a position to swing – I am looking at the other sledgehammer – the Scottish male gets up, and reaches up and tries to obstruct me from moving forward. When he is on his way, trying to get the hammer, I push him away.” He said he was trying to get the hammer on the floor, for further confiscation of items.
When Mr Morris cross-examined him, he said “the reason why I chose to push him, he got up and reached forward to take hold of the hammer”. So he suggested that Jordan was reaching forward, to get the hammer, and that’s why Volante moved forward and pushed his neck with the handle. When Mr Morris asked Volante, if Devlin had stayed on the floor, would he have gone for the others, he said yes, without explaining why. The lawyer also asked Volante if Jordan was a threat at this time, and he said yes, Mr Devlin chose to get up off the ground, grab the hammer and tangle him up and he felt threatened by him trying to get up.
Mr Morris played the footage again to the jury asking them if they can see Jordan reaching for the sledgehammer on the floor. We see Mr Devlin slip, probably on the fire extinguisher foam, but he doesn’t appear to reach for the hammer.
Mr Morris suggests it’s a matter for the jury to decide, but the explanation doesn’t seem to match, and he said that it might affect the security guard’s credibility, but it was also important because it started a chain of events. He suggested it was an unlawful attack on Jordan, instigated by Volante when Jordan posed no risk, and led to the moment which the prosecution say the jury can hold against Mr Devlin on the charge of violent disorder. Mr Morris asks whether Jordan really behaved excessively after being hit like that?
What Volante did in that incident says a lot about his use of force from the start. Mr Morris played the footage of Volante with sledgehammer in hand, screaming at the two female defendants. He’d told the jury it was to ‘subdue, de-escalate and intimidate’.
When the prosecution had played this footage, in relation to Mr Devlin they asked the jury to look beyond the two women and watch him. They say he appears to push PC Buxton to the ground. Mr Morris notes that PC Buxton never alleged that he was pushed, just that they both ended up on the ground. It’s not clear from the footage and the jury will have to decide, but what can be seen is that when Volante applies his chokehold, Jordan’s back arches up off the floor, such was the level of what the security guard was doing. And the medical evidence again shows bruising to Jordan’s neck.
Mr Morris asked the jury to bear all this in mind when watching the earlier footage of Mr Volante first entering, with whip in hand. He asks them to consider whether it shows him having a look around, risk assessing, trying to see what he should do. It shows him going straight in, whip in hand and screaming. The prosecution say he has a right to be loud and assertive – to use reasonable force to stop people damaging Elbit’s property – but they have to say that don’t they? Because they have to say he used reasonable force, because there’s a problem with their case otherwise. But, Mr Morris tells the jury, they can see him run in and immediately push Mr Devlin after screaming.
The lawyer reminded the jurors that in cross-examination he’d asked Volante if he’d had training in de-escalation, and he said he had. It was a matter for the jury to decide if that was an attempt to de-escalate and if the way he came in was reasonable force – Jordan had nothing in his hands, he’s just standing there, in fact with hands on hips.
Mr Menon had asked Volante why he was screaming, and he responded that it was about intimidation and compliance. Mr Morris questioned why then was there a need to push too, and the whip is an item that could cause injury as well, which he chose to run in with. Mr Devlin posed no threat, he was unarmed. Where was that ju-jitsu training and de-escalation training Mr Volante had, to approach with a more calm and reasonable manner?
So this was the start of a series of altercations. Mr Morris noted that Volante had denied he used force immediately, and that shouting was part of de-escalation – matters for the jury to determine. Volante also changed what he said about who had a sledgehammer, and who he took the sledgehammer off. Again, a matter for the jury.
Mr Morris also played the footage that showed Volante, with hammer in hand, kick Mr Devlin, when he was next to Ms Rogers – another example of what he did.
In cross-examination, Volante had also been shown a clip which appeared to show him hit Jordan over the head with a sledgehammer. Mr Morris played that again to the jury. Although Mr Volante denied it, it was another matter for them to decide, but Morris also reminded the jury of what Jordan had said during that incident “Just leave it mate, it’s not worth your job”. Volante shouted at him to put the sledgehammer down and Jordan said “This place is not going to exist tomorrow”. Mr. Volante said, yes it is. Put that down. “You’re not going to have a job tomorrow. Don’t try and protect it”. Mr Morris suggests these comments really aren’t threats by Mr. Devlin about violence, but Volante then says “Don’t you fuck… If you swing that once more at me, it’s going to get really serious, okay?” What’s that, asks Mr Morris, what is Volante saying to Mr Devlin? And Jordan replies “It’s time to leave mate”. These aren’t threats, Mr Morris tells the jury – they are attempts by Mr Devlin to de-escalate.
Before playing the clip of the next incident, Mr Morris suggests that what it shows is that the minute after Jordan is given the sledgehammer by Charlotte Head, Mr Volante comes towards him with his sledgehammer. And Mr. Devlin has his sledgehammer down by his side, by his right side, while Mr Volante has his above his head, moving towards Mr Devlin. Jordan’s left hand is up, pointing at the door. This has also been described as the ‘Star Wars’ moment, because Jordan says something like ‘This is our Star Wars moment – Elbit are the Empire’. Mr Morris doesn’t dwell on this other than he’s tempted to talk about what a Jedi is, what Jedis mean, and how they deal with matters of conflict.
Moving to the next incident, Mr Morris plays the footage after telling the jury it shows Jordan with two others, effectively guiding Volante out of the factory floor. He has his sledgehammer down during this moment. Again, Mr Morris suggests that Jordan is not threatening anyone – obviously he wants Volante to leave, but effectively Volante walks out, and then Jordan puts the pallet up against the door. Again it’s a matter for the jury to look at this.
Noting that they’d now seen all CCTV evidence available, Mr Morris told the jury he wanted to address the issue of the missing footage. He asked them to look at the map of cameras they’d been given. He said it was up to them how to interpret this, because they know that this issue arose in the middle of the trial and they’d the heard evidence about it, but the fact remains that Camera 23 would have shown the alcove incident and might have shown Mr Volante going forward towards Mr Devlin with his sledgehammer raised. Whether it had a slow frame-rate isn’t the point. The court has footage from Camera 21 at a slow-frame rate. And Camera 24 would also have shown what Mr Volante had in his hand. Mr Morris said it was up to the jury what conclusion to draw, but they’d heard about the emails between Elbit and the police about their CCTV system and how the defence might take advantage, but “we’re not taking advantage – we just don’t have it – there’s a difference”.
Moving towards his conclusion, Mr Morris reminded the jury of what Ms Oborne had observed, that there was a real naivety, collectively, among the defendants in this case. Mr Devlin had turned up in Bristol, not knowing where the safe house would be. The first time he’s even mentioned in the sequence of events is 4th August, just two days before the action, and the jury must decide whether the prosecution have met their burden of proof about his knowledge, about his intent to commit criminal damage.
In her evidence Charlotte Head had said that Mr Devlin turned up quite late in their series of online meetings. The jury will need to consider Mr Devlin’s injuries. Mr Morris asked them to look at the photo of the one on his arm, the shape of a sledgehammer head, maybe from one of the times Mr Volante struck him. He reminded the jury of comments about the bruising that he developed by the time he was taken to the magistrate’s court – these weren’t minor injuries. The jury have been told this action was meticulously planned, but they know Mr Devlin was out buying equipment just before it was going to happen – is this meticulous planning? It’s a matter for the jury to consider the burden of proof as to whether there was meticulous planning.
Then Mr Morris returned to Jordan’s good character. He told the jury that people hadn’t just said he was of good character but that they spoke about him in impeccable terms. And what they said was relevant to how he behaved with security guards, how he behaves in relation to conflict. Mr Morris suggested the jury give considerable weight to his good character.
Turning to the charges against Mr Devlin, Mr Morris said the footage showed Jordan holding the sledgehammer down most of the time, and not threatening anyone with it, suggesting he had no intention of using it as a weapon. By the time he perhaps gets involved with PC Buxton, Mr Volante had already hit him. He doesn’t need to give evidence because it’s all there on the footage. There’s nothing he could possibly add.
In relation to criminal damage, everything is at issue and it’s up to the jury to decide if the prosecution have discharged their burden of proof.
And on violent disorder, there is no evidence that Mr Devlin threatened unlawful violence, and certainly no evidence he did it in a group of three, present together. He was, Mr Morris suggested, the victim of some unlawful violence from Mr Volante.
Mr Morris asked the jury to consider the judge’s direction about whether to hold it against Mr Devlin that he didn’t give evidence, and asked them, when they look at the footage, is there really anything that calls for an answer? It’s not about testing an answer in the witness box – it’s about whether the prosecution have made the jury sure about his guilt.
The defence submission is that Mr Devlin should be found Not Guilty on every charge.
All six defence speeches have been delivered. The judge has given his summary of the case and some additional legal directions, including some comments addressing the closing speech made by chief defence barrister, Rajiv Menon KC, last week (see the start of this article above).
The jury is now considering their verdicts for each defendant on each charge and noone knows how long this will take.
Keep locked to Real Media’s social media channels for breaking news when the verdict is announced.
