The verdict is in on the case of the Colston statue in Bristol. Not guilty. Every one of the accused is innocent. And I mean that: everyone is innocent until proven guilty. If found not guilty, they must — at all times — have retained their innocence. But something feels wrong. Eminent lawyers have described the verdict as both absurd and perverse.
In the UK we ‘relate’ to law. We aren’t taught it in schools. Our parents, teachers, instead introduce it to us by osmosis. We have a feel for it, a grasp of it. We might have felt we knew what criminal damage was, and we might have felt that pulling down a statue was wrong.
That turns out to be an error. It seems that there is a defence to any charge of criminal damage if you ‘genuinely believe the owner consents to you doing the damage’. And it turns out that how genuine you are is a question for a jury. This jury concluded that the people doing the act genuinely believed that the owners of the statue consented to the act of pulling it down.
We might think that there is a simple problem in the law here. Because if anyone in future both says they believed the ‘owner’ had agreed to a statue being pulled down, then they can do what they like. This is an obvious problem.
Other arguments were made — that the statue (when put up and since) was abusive or threatening, and that it was an indecent display. These are obviously silly. But while we don’t know the jury, we may credit them some intelligence
This verdict also represents something else. Something bigger that has been building for 20 or so years: an assault on the rule of law.
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