Outbreak of commonsense in South Australia

The story about the Kingsnorth protestors being served with an injunction to make them leave the ship they hi-jacked, reminds me of my Bright Idea that instead of pressing criminal charges, the owners of Kingsnorth ought to sue them for civil damages.

That way you don't have to worry about a jury falling for some sob-story or other (and you scoring a massive own-goal), and however nominal the damages, they will be a heck of a lot more than the protestors can afford, in the long run.

It appears that enterprising sheep exporters in South Australia did exactly that (or try this link) when an 'activist' contaminated the sheep feedlot.

Whether $70,000 fully compensates the exporters and whether it includes punitive damages, I do not know. Whether the 'activist' will ever pay up, I do not know either. But I guess that the possibility of this sort of outcome will weigh much more heavily on protestors' minds than the risk that they end up in prison for a week or two and hence become martyrs to [whatever] cause.

The Kingsnorth Six

The Fat Bigot's musings on this set me thinking...

That they committed criminal damage appears to be beyond dispute, so the whole case was about lawful excuse, e.g. "Judge David Caddick said that the case centred on whether or not the protesters had a lawful excuse for their actions. He told the jury that for a lawful excuse to be used it must be proved that the action was due to an immediate need to protect property belonging to another."

Typical examples for this are; you see a child or dog dying of heat stroke in the back of a parked car and you smash the window open; or the fire brigade have to smash down a door in order to put out a fire. Fair enough, that's immediate need. But even the most hardened MMGW proponents are only saying that temperatures will rise as some vague unspecified point in the future (they keep pushing this date back of course, now that temperatures are going down again). So the reasonable defence of immediate need obviously can't apply here; the question is, out of twelve jurors (a couple of whom will inevitably be MMGW nutters themselves), how many would fall for this?

Anyway, the answer appears to be that "a jury that accepted their claim that only “emergency action” could stop damage to the environment and decided by a 10-2 majority that they did not act with criminal intent."

At least, Greenpeace are spinning it that way - according to them, a majority of the jury went for 'Not guilty'.

Does really this mean that ten out of twelve jurors were that gullible? That would be very worrying and suggest that the opinion polls on attitudes to MMGW, which say that public opinion is split 50/50 or even mildly sceptical overall are wildly wrong.

According to Wiki "In the past a unanimous verdict was required. This has been changed so that, if the jury fail to agree after a given period, at the discretion of the judge they may reach a verdict by a 10-2 majority."

In other words, in criminal trials, you only get convicted if at least ten jurors say so. Or you get off the hook if at least three jurors say so.

So, in order to preserve my sanity, I shall assume, for the time being, that the Kingsnorth Six got off the hook because there were three gullible idiots on the jury, rather than there being ten gullible idiots on the jury. Or would the former verdict have been reported as "The jury failed to reach a verdict"? In which case we are well and truly stuffed.

A little tip for E.On: in future don't press criminal charges in cases like this. Take a straightforward civil case, in which case there are no criminal penalties, you just put in a claim for the costs of cleaning off graffiti and loss of earnings from having to shut down operations for a couple of days etc.