A judge has given heavy sentences to two Just Stop Oil protesters who brought traffic at the Dartford Crossing to a standstill last year.
Sentencing Morgan Trowland, 40, to three years in prison and 34-year-old Marcus Decker to two years and seven months, Judge Shane Collery KC said on Friday that the pair had to be “punished” for the chaos they caused to deter others from similar disruptive tactics.
Of course, such sentences are a vindication of their stance. Look how much they’re willing to risk to get their view across. Right?
It’s a start.
Now let’s see how many others are equally committed (there’s an obvious pun in there but it’s pretty clumsy).
I’m thinking in particular about Roger Hallam who to date has somehow avoided imprisonment despite numerous arrests and prosecutions. How about it Roger?
Let’s see how many of this weekends martyrs to the cause end up in chokey……………
For a moment I was hopeful there Addolff. I thought you said ‘choking’.
I wonder what comments the judge made about parole? Zealotry being what it is, they are unrepentant and seem very likely to do similar things upon release.
I would like the sentencing to fit the crime. Fairly estimate the number of man hours of peoples lives wasted by the delays. Divide by two to avoid arguments the estimate was too high (but if successfully challenged the revised delay time is not divided by two). Then put the protestors in jail for that length of time. So for 70,000 people delayed for 4 hours the jail sentence would be 140,000 hours or 16 years.
The whole point of civil disobedience is that you are showing you are willing to trade your freedom to make a point. So the only possible conclusion *is* to jail them.
Normally, though, civil disobedience is an act against the state, the trade is disrupt the state for loss of freedom. The overwhelming character in recent years is to disrupt members of the public. But those members of the public are not the ones who have the agency to respond to the protests.
As a society we abdicate our right to use violence to the state, so the state has to respond good and hard on our behalf.
It’s a start, but the sentences were far too lenient. AndyF’s 16 years is more like it. That keeps the buggers from disrupting us for that long at least. The rhetoric from these people being that for every one jailed, there will be ten more to take their place. I suspect that this is being optimistic. These people are LARPers and when they have to spend some time inside with the knock on consequences to their lives, they might be less keen. We can only hope so.
Surely they should be jailed with no release before 2030- according to them the world is going to end then anyway, so there is no point in a longer sentence…
Perhaps we could just change the law to make it legal to drive over them. They or their estates would be liable for any damage to the vehicle.
What would be fun was to join JSO gain trust by offering to supply the mulled wine for the fund raising xmas soirée at Philomena’s pied à terre. Then proceed to live stream upturning the urn’s contents on the cream carpet and sofa revealing a t shirt that says “just stop just stop oil”.
Even better if they can be sued by people who lost money because of their stunt. Jail then bankruptcy and then deportation (ones a new zealander and the others German) should do nicely.