Palestine Action defendants are facing sentencing as terrorists despite being convicted of criminal damage, lifted reporting restrictions reveal.
After reporting restrictions were lifted on Tuesday, Middle East Eye is now able to report for the first time that the court will seek to add a “terrorism connection” to their charges at sentencing - a fact that was kept secret from the jury.
Reporting restrictions also barred media from revealing that the defendants had been prohibited from explaining the motivations for their involvement in the raid to jurors.
Prior to the initial trial, the judge had ruled to remove the defence of lawful excuse on the charge of criminal damage, which meant the activists could not argue that the damage they caused was legally justified to prevent greater crimes being committed by Israel’s military in Gaza.
Isn’t it more like they accused them of damaging property, the jury agreed that they did damage property and the judge decides that the damage was serious enough to fall under terrorism? It’s like mitigating circumstances. The jury decides if a parson did X but it’s up to the judge to decide if any mitigating circumstances should apply before sentencing. Here the circumstances are aggravating.
But they weren’t convicted of terrorism, which has a legal definition. So the judge shouldn’t be considering it as an aggravating circumstance since there’s no terrorism conviction.
The aggravation is terrorism , not terrorism. They don’t have to be convicted of terrorism for the terrorism connection aggravation to apply.
https://sentencingcouncil.org.uk/guidelines/offences-with-a-terrorist-connection-guidance/
From what I’ve read Schedule 1 are terrorism related charges. As you can see terrorist connection aggravation can be applied to crimes covered and not covered by Schedule 1.