Lucy Connolly’s appeal against sentence was heard on 15th May. Somewhat unusually for an appeal against sentence she was not given an immediate decision. The three judges hearing the case have reserved judgment, and say they will produce their judgment “as soon as possible.”
What are the chances that they will decide to reduce her 31 month prison sentence?
The case is now so well known that most readers will be aware of the facts, but to understand her prospects of success we need to set out the chronology and the applicable law and procedure in a little detail.
On the morning of 29th July 2024 three young girls were murdered and five more seriously injured in a horrific knife attack at a Southport dance studio. The murderer, seventeen year old Axel Rudakubana, was arrested at the scene, but he was not immediately named by police. At once, rumours about the identity of the killer and his likely motives swirled around social media. Many wrongly assumed that he was an illegal immigrant and that the children had been murdered in an Islamist terrorist attack.
One of those caught up in the speculation was Lucy Connolly, a Northampton childminder of hitherto impeccable character.
At 8.30 that evening she posted a tweet:
“Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these familes will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it.”
In 2011 Mrs Connolly’s 19 month old son died as a result of medical negligence. As she was later to explain, that tragedy had made her acutely sensitive to hearing about the murders of children.
Her tweet stayed up for about 3 ½ hours. But before going to bed Mrs Connolly realised that it had been ill-advised. She deleted it.
By then it had been viewed 310,000 times, with 940 retweets and 58 quote-tweets.
The next day a riot broke out in Southport. Protestors tried to storm the local mosque, which had no connection to the murders of the children. Others concentrated on fighting the police. Some set fire to a police van.
In the following days more riots broke out across England and Northern Ireland. Whilst many shops and businesses were looted, the mobs’ fury was particularly directed at muslims, refugees and illegal immigrants. A Citizen’s Advice Bureau in Sunderland was set on fire, presumably because it was seen as offering assistance to immigrants. In one particularly serious riot in Rotherham protestors entered and tried to burn down a hotel which had been housing asylum seekers.
Hundreds of the rioters were arrested, as were at least 30 others who had not physically participated in the rioting but who were accused of posting inflammatory messages on social media. Those who were charged and pleaded guilty generally received what were seen as severe sentences, although some thought not severe enough; at least one Crown Court judge asked why some of the rioters were being charged with the relatively low level offence of “violent disorder” rather than the more serious charge of “riot.”
Mrs Connolly did not participate in any riot, and at the time she posted her tweet there had not been any. But of course she heard about them in the days that followed. She posted on a Whats App group “… raging tweet about burning down hotels has bit me on the arse lol.” That was an understatment, and not laugh out loud funny.
Anticipating her arrest she sent another message saying that, if it happened, she would “play the mental health card.” She was indeed arrested and in due course charged with an offence under S.19 of the Public Order Act 1986.
The relevant part is subsection (1):
“A person who publishes or distributes written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting is guilty of an offence if –
(a) he intends thereby to stir up racial hatred, or
(b) having regard to all the circumstances racial hatred is likely to be stirred up thereby.”
As we can see, the offence can be committed without any specific intent, if racial hatred is in fact “likely to be stirred up” by the publication of the material. But Mrs Connolly’s charge specified the more serious version of the offence: that she “intended thereby to stir up racial hatred.”
The maximum sentence is seven years imprisonment. That is two years longer than the maximum sentence for violent disorder, the offence with which many (though not all) of the rioters were charged.
Prosecutions under S.19 require the consent of the Attorney General. Presumably this was obtained, and on 10th August Mrs Connolly found herself in the Magistrates Court.
Although the offence can be tried in the Magistrates Court her case was considered unsuitable for summary trial.
The procedure when that happens is that defendants are asked for an indication of plea. If they indicate an intention to plead guilty the case is sent to the Crown Court for sentence. If a “not guilty” plea is indicated, or if no indication is given, it is sent to the Crown Court for a formal plea hearing, the next step on a possible route to a trial by jury. There is a well-established practice that the earlier a guilty plea is indicated the greater will be the ultimate reduction in sentence. The aim of this is to persuade those who are guilty to admit their guilt as soon as possible, thereby saving valuable court time and public money. It is not meant to put pressure on the innocent to admit guilt, although of course that effect can hardly be avoided in practice.
Mrs Connolly gave no indication of plea, so the case was sent to the Northampton Crown Court to be prepared for trial. She was remanded in custody.
A brief hearing took place on August 12th, but for some reason the judge adjourned it to September 2nd, at which point Mrs Connolly, who attended over a video link, entered a guilty plea to the offence of “distributing material with the intention of stirring up racial hatred.”
The Probation Service was directed to prepare a “pre-sentence report” and sentencing was adjourned to October 17th.
On October 17th Mrs Connolly’s case was heard by Judge Melbourne Inman KC, The Recorder of Birmingham (not to be confused with the Melbourne Inman who won the world billiards championship five times between 1908 and 1919).
He passed a sentence of 31 months imprisonment. His sentencing remarks were published on the judiciary.uk website, and you can even watch him passing sentence on you tube should you wish.
In recent weeks the formerly rather arcane subject of sentencing guidelines has been in the public eye for other reasons, but this is not the place to discuss those. The guidelines are produced by the Sentencing Council, a body of senior judges, lawyers and academics established in 2010. The law is now set out in S.59 of the Sentencing Act 2020: Judges must:
“… in, sentencing an offender, follow any sentencing guidelines which are relevant to the offender’s case, … unless the court is satisfied that it would be contrary to the interests of justice to do so.”
A judge’s discretion is thus constrained by the requirement to pass a sentence within the relevant guideline. It is only in exceptional circumstances that they are entitled to depart from it. None of Mrs Connolly’s lawyers have ever suggested that these existed in her case.
The relevant guideline in Mrs Connolly’s case was that on racial hatred offences. It follows the typical pattern of sentencing guidelines, by requiring the judge first to place the offence into the relevant category, before adjusting it up or down to take account of the aggravating or mitigating features.
The categorisation of an offence is determined by a combination of the offender’s culpability (graded from A – C with A being the most serious) and the harm caused by the offence (either 1 or 2, with 1 being the more serious).
At the sentencing hearing the Crown Mrs Connolly’s solicitor advocate accepted that she had “intended to incite serious violence.” That gave the judge no option but to place her offence in Category A for culpability.
What about harm?
Again the judge had no option but to place her case into category 1. The obvious (even if it was not the only possible) meaning of her tweet was to encourage the burning of hotels; but even if that was not so a tweet that was viewed 310,000 times was, unarguably, “widely disseminated.”
Those categorisations effectively forced Judge Inman towards a “starting point” of 3 years imprisonment.
He was then required to adjust the figure upwards and downwards to reflect the aggravating and mitigating features of the case.
Here the guidelines provide a “non-exhaustive” selection of factors which the judge needs to take into account. First the aggravating factors:
The only one which seems applicable, but it was crucial, is the timing of the tweet, made at a particularly “sensitive” time just after the Southport murders. That said, at the time she posted the tweet, as far as I know, no riots had yet occurred. It was not quite as sensitive as it would have been had she posted it while the riots were actually happening.
As for mitigating factors, several undoubtedly were relevant:
Mrs Connolly had no previous convictions, and there were many references speaking to her good character. She deleted the tweet a matter of hours after posting it (“offender took steps to limit dissemination”) and she had sent some messages afterwards saying that violence was not the answer. She was also the primary carer for her 12 year old daughter and worked as a child-minder. Although she had referred to “playing the mental health card” before her arrest, in the event she did not do so, apart from referring to her mental health problems 12 years earlier when her own child had died. She did not claim to be suffering from any psychiatric condition, and the judge said “there is no evidence of any mental disorder having a material affect on you committing this offence.”
Having started, as he was required to do, at a sentence of 3 years, the judge then increased the notional sentence by 6 months, to reflect his view of both the mitigating and the aggravating factors. Clearly he thought the aggravating factor of the timing of the offence outtweighed all the mitigation. That took the sentence up to 42 months. He then reduced that sentence by 25%, the standard reduction for a defendant who does not indicate a guilty plea until the case reaches the Crown Court. That led to a reduction of ten and a half months, which the judge then rounded up in her favour to 11 months, to arrive at the final sentence of 31 months.
A defendant wishing to appeal her sentence normally has 28 days to lodge the notice of appeal, although the the time limit is in practice reasonably flexible. In this case she missed the 28 day deadline, presumably because her trial lawyers advised that an appeal would be hopeless.
Following something of a press campaign, Mrs Connolly filed her appeal out of time, supported by the Free Speech Union, who have paid for her representation by a different barrister, the extremely clever Adam King. His recent appearances in the Court of Appeal have included resisting an appeal by Marcus Trowland against his three year sentence for climbing the towers of the QE2 bridge on the M25. He is one of the few members of the bar who have expressed any concerns about the safety of Lucy Letby’s convictions. He is also a highly accomplished mathmetician, a skill which he has needed in this appeal, the subtleties of which are not easy to comprehend without a grasp of mental arithmetic and ability to calculate percentages in ones head (and Mr King’s mathematical expertise goes far beyond a facility with mental arithmetic).
King based his appeal on two grounds.
The first was that Judge Inman wrongly categorised the case as Culpability A because Mrs Connolly had no intention to “incite serious violence.” Without that intention the case would have fallen into Culpability B, and the judge’s “starting point” would have been 2 years, rather than 3 years imprisonment. Even after adding the judge’s notional 6 months for the “aggravating factors,” once the 25% reduction to reflect her guilty plea had been applied, she would then have been certain to receive a sentence of under two years, probably around 22 months. With release after serving 40% she would have been free to return home. (In theory a sentence of 2 years or below could even have been suspended, although such a result would not be much use to her now).
The second ground was that the judge simply failed to give sufficient weight to the many mitigating factors in the case. If he had given them the proper weight, the sentence would have been shorter.
Mrs Connolly faced an immediate problem with the first ground, which was that Liam Muir, her advocate at the sentencing hearing had explicitly accepted that she did have an intent to incite serious violence.
Mrs Connolly said that he had acted outside his instructions in doing so, and that the effect of accepting that her case fell into Culpability Category A was never explained to her.
There was thus a factual dispute between Mrs Connolly and her original solicitor. The Court of Appeal decided that the only way to resolve it was to take the extremely unusual step of hearing evidence from Mrs Connolly and her former solicitor.
Thus it was that at the appeal hearing last week both Mrs Connolly and Mr Muir, gave evidence.
Mrs Connolly was asked by Mr King:
“Was it made clear to you that what Mr Muir was saying to the prosecution was that you would concede you were intending to incite serious violence?”
She replied “no.”
Mr Muir was asked about the same point. He insisted that he had indeed explained that she would be sentenced on the basis that she intended to incite serious violence. In fact, he said, he had discussed it with her more than once, and had “no doubts whatsoever” that she had understood the point.
It is a most unfortunate breakdown in the relationship between solicitor and client, but it does not mean that either Mrs Connolly or Mr Muir is necessarily lying. Perhaps there was a genuine misunderstanding, or perhaps someone’s memory is at fault. The appeal judges will have to decide as best they can where the truth lies. In very general terms, however, I think it is fair to say that criticisms of trial lawyers are seldom looked upon very favourably by the Court of Appeal.
What both Mrs Connolly and Mr Muir do seem to agree on is that she was anxious to be sentenced as quickly as possible, and did not want to risk losing further “credit” by delaying the case. If she had insisted that she had no intent to incite serious violence the likelihood is that the prosecution would not have conceded the point, and there would then have been a hearing before a judge, known as a “Newton” hearing, to decide what her actual intention was. Had the judge then decided against her (and no jury would have been involved) her reduction for pleading guilty would have been reduced to no more than 12.5%. Given the incendiary wording of her tweet one can see why she might have thought that her chances at a Newton hearing would not have been particularly good, and any decent lawyer would have warned her of the danger that contesting this point ran the risk of losing half of her credit for pleading guilty in the first place.
The title to this post is “will Lucy Connolly win her appeal against sentence?” and if you have got this far you are entitled to my answer. In my view she is very unlikely to win on this ground.
On her second ground – the argument that the judge did not give sufficient weight to the mitigating factors, or gave disproportionate weight to the aggravating factor – she might have a rather better chance.
Having started at a sentence of 3 years imprisonment, as the 1A guideline required, Judge Inman then increased the sentence to reflect the single “aggravating factor” that the tweet was posted at a “particularly sensitive time.” He listed a series of mitigating features: her good character, the references, the effect on her child, the fact that she deleted the tweet and so on. But having done so, he still increased the notional sentence before credit for her guilty plea to 3 ½ years. He obviously felt that the single aggravating factor far outweighed the mitigation.
I’m not convinced he was right about that. “Sensitive” though the timing was, and however outrageous the tweet, Mrs Connolly wasn’t to know at the time she posted the tweet that riots were about to break out, although perhaps that is not a very good point if she was deliberately encouraging them. Some judges might have felt, and for what little it’s worth I think, that the mitigation at least balanced the aggravation and that the notional sentence should have come back down to 3 years. If that had been done, the credit for plea would then have reduced the sentence by a further 25%, resulting in a final sentence of 27 months.
Though the difference between 31 months and 27 months is small, the effect of such a modest reduction would be that Mrs Connolly would be released in the very near future, instead of having to remain in prison until August.
So will she win on this second ground? The question the appeal judges will ask themselves is not “what do we think the correct sentence would have been?” but instead “was the sentence imposed by the judge manifestly excessive?” Judges in the court sometimes like to say that it is not their job to “tinker” with sentences passed in the Crown Court. Would a reduction of 4 months out of a total sentence of 31 months be tinkering or would it be the correction of a manifestly excessive sentence? Either is arguable, but my guess is that the chances of any reduction in her sentence remain pretty slim.
Two further points need to be made. The first is that almost all the criticisms of the severity of Mrs Connolly’s sentence have contrasted it with the apparent leniency shown in some other case, invariably of some totally different crime. Apart from the fact that cases vary infinitely, and the brief reports of the comparator cases never include enough detail to really know why a particular sentence was passed, such comparisons are beside the point. A judge passing sentence in a particular case is required by law to follow the guidelines, save in the most unusual circumstances. Any judge who decides not to sentence within the guidelines because he believed that some other defendant in some other case was sentenced too leniently, or too severely, would simply not be acting lawfully, and in any case would quickly find his sentences being overturned on appeal. You might not like the law that gives such weight to sentencing guidelines (I happen to think that their introduction has contributed to the unsustainable rise in the prison population that we are now struggling to deal with), but you shouldn’t blame the judges for following them when that is what the law dictates.
And one final point needs to be made. Judge Inman – who I do not know and have never knowingly met in or out of court – cannot possibly be blamed for placing Mrs Connolly’s case into Category 1A for sentencing purposes. Both prosecution and defence agreed that it had to be. And in fairness to Mrs Connolly she does not blame him for it, even now. She blames her solicitor. Of course a different judge might have passed a heavier or a lighter sentence, but any suggestion that Judge Inman was influenced by political pressure to impose a heavier sentence than Mrs Connolly would otherwise have received is a ludicrous conspiracy theory. Unsubstantiated attacks on the integrity (as opposed to the judgement) of judges are unfair because judges are not allowed to respond. They are also dangerous, because without trust in the integrity of judges there can be no trust in the integrity of the legal system, without which no free society can hope to survive.
With respect this rather misses the point. Your last paragraph is correct, but there are far too many decisions that while doubtless legally justified look appalling. The most obvious is the MP assault. Doubtless itself also technically justifiable, but you have 3 years for a Twitter rant versus one day for violent assault.
To preserve the integrity of the legal system it has to actually have some en masse, not a reliance on technical seperate justifications. People do not see it like that, they see it as a single entity, as you do in your last paragraph.
And tbh, I think they are right. A root issue is the rape gangs. I have a significant amount of experience of ACPC type groups. Doubtless they too can make a case that the response was justified. It just wasn’t at any time I’m aware of. Pragmatism sometimes takes over, but not remotely to this extent.
What are “ACPC type groups”?
Area Child Protection Committee , it’s basically an action group that would deal with things like this. I don’t think there’s a standard name, but there’s the same body in all Soc Service depts
Now abolished & replaced by Local Safeguarding Children Boards. Not an action group but a part of the Statutory framework of child protection. Fundamental misunderstanding of roles
That’s what ACPC et al were. Action group was poor language as it sounds like a protest group !
Looks to me that the boards are about policy and procedures, rather than dealing with specific issues and incidents. But I’ve been out of the loop for a while now
It’s the bigger picture, the public’s perceived perception of injustice, enshrined in the law, that, rightly has caused such outrage, here and overseas. The term ‘two-tier’ justice rightly describes the end result of a system refined into thousands of parts but which, like some biblical exegesis, like medieval schoolmen spending months debating how many angels can stand on a pin head, the essential issue has been lost. Any sentencing guidelines that see burglars slapped on the wrist whilst the Lucy Connallys of this world are banged up are absurd, both in the eyes of the public, AND in anyone who values a just justice system.
Are you seriously arguing that a two-tier justice system doesn’t exist?
Justicial principles must abide, to a great extent, with what the average man in the street believes to be fair. Clearly that man considers them, alongside a clear move towards totalitarianism and restrictions on free speech, to be decidedly unfair.
It is not seen why this case was not given, as a first offence, a verbal warning? Due to the tyranny of gov and the judicial system in this country it is not possible to make comments without threat of imprisonment. So much for the claimed freedoms of speech and expression made by Starmer to Vance when challenged. The authorities are perceived and alleged corrupt all the way to the top.
If, instead of burning hotels full of immigrants she had tweeted “I’m sick of Jews,let’s burn down their filthy synagogues and clear them out of North London once and for all, if that makes me anti-semitic, so be it,” would that best be dealt with by a warning or prosecution? And what if she’d said it to a crowded meeting? Or to a group of thugs? Is it OK to say similar things about immigrants, or just ok because it’s on twitter? At what point is a verbal warning insufficient?
She didn’t say “Let’s burn down their filthy synagogues”. She said ” set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care”.
It was Labour party policy for thirteen years that immigrants could “Gang rape and groom working class girls for all they care”. That was their partyu position. Connely’s position on hotel burnings was similar. Is the crime just being honest about it?
Naz Shah – an MP of the governing party – retweeted “Those abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of diversity”.
And, of course – in the light of the mass-stabbing terrorist attack* – a Labour councilor got in front of a crowd and did call for people to follow Axel’s example and have and that “we need to cut all their throats”. The prosecutors don’t seem to be in a hurry for him to go to court.
You say “They are also dangerous, because without trust in the integrity of judges there can be no trust in the integrity of the legal system, without which no free society can hope to survive.” but surely this should be more of a warning for the courts to act with integrity rather than simply expecting the weaker “to shut their mouths. For the good of diversity”?
* You say “that the children had been murdered in an Islamist terrorist attack” as false information. The Prime Minister has since admitted that it was a terrorist attack by someone with Al Qaeda materials. Probably, if he’d acknowledged from the start that was what happened the minor riots could have been avoided altogether.
I think the answer to this is a prosecution, but one that given it was just a tweet, that caused no apparent harm, and which was repented of and deleted in less than 4 hours, should not lead to custody.
If she had exhorted a mob to stampede into the synagogue and kill however, that would be radically different. The top of range 6 y, less discount for plea, would be appropriate.
Part of the issue, it seems to me, is that if the “harm” element of the guideline doesn’t adequately distinguish between a Marius rallying the crowd and a stupid (indeed wicked) but ephemeral and insignificant tweet. As I argue in a substantive comment below. Even on the (IMHO transparently false premise) that she intended serious violence, surely you have to examine the actual likelihood that the specific criminal act would actually have *caused* violence. Suppose some knuckle-dragger spray-painted “Kill the P**is” on a wall by a road that thousands of cars pass down every hour. (There must be many real world examples of this over the decades.) Would we seriously lock him up for around 3 years?
Good question.
People understand there are often bad decisions we don’t get. Doubtless most are legally justifiable as you have done very well, but it has to be seen as a whole.
People look at Connolly,31 months, and the ex MP, 1 day the rest suspended.
Another example today. MP who got threats on Twitter. 15 months. Wonder how much investigation has gone into the Batley teacher
Finally these things aren’t ludicrous conspiracy theories. I have experience of SSDs and a relative who was a victim of, and was ignored, we had to dissuade her father from going out with a baseball bat.
I think you are conflating actual conspiracy, and things like groupthink, our idiot PM gobbling off and so on. There are many things between direct conspiracy and ludicrous ideas
Exactly
So you just jumped in to comment without reading any of the article then?
Or the Court of Appeal judgment, R v Connolly [2025] EWCA Crim 657 (available to download from BAILII: https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Crim/2025/657.html) in which the appeal judges explain in detail why the appeal was dismissed, including recording, at paragraph 67, that the principal ground of appeal “was substantially based on a version of events put forward by the applicant which we have rejected.” In other words, the judges did not believe the evidence that Mrs Connolly gave to the court.
Both comprehensive and clear. Thank you for taking the time to write this.
A few observations on this.
First, why was she denied bail? I can’t see any lawful basis for that. It was either a panicked or a deliberately heavy handed approach to the civil disorder. But I suspect that has led to a lot of what has followed. The desperation to get things over and done with as quickly as possible, which clearly fed into the admission of intent to cause serious violence which seems obviously misplaced. If the Crown had demanded a Newton hearing on that, I disagree with your assessment. I think it almost certain she’d have won it.
Second, the guidelines. One of the issues I have with them is the wild variance between maximum sentences and sentencing ranges. For crimes that offend modern liberal mores, the guidelines (IMV rightly) go a long way towards the maximum, with some headroom then left for exceptional cases. Here for example, the top of range sentence (6y) is 86% of the maximum (7y). For stalking type offences it’s much the same ,as it is for coercive and controlling behaviour. All this is as it should be, not least as it respects the expressed will of Parliament in setting the stat maximum. But for boring old offence like burglary and criminal damage for example, the range goes to just 40% of the maximum. For possession of class A drugs it’s just 15%!
Not only does this raise issues of democratic accountability and liberal bias (one imagines members of the sentencing council won’t have many friend or relations who incite racial hatred, but most of them will know people who’ve at some point been in possession of cocaine); it has a knock on effect down the line even for less serious categories of offence. And so it leads to people calling out the absurdity of this woman being gaoled for far longer for a tweet that was up for <4 hours than people who have actually used fairly serious violence. Or ransacked someone’s house. This does lead to perceptions of “two tier justice” and this has its root in sentencing guidelines wildly varying in severity from one offence to another, with a tendency to be much more severe in a crime like this as compared to, say, burglary.
Lastly, you ask a highly pertinent question in your reply to a comment about what would be the difference if she said this to a crowd. That is surely a key difference which I’m not sure the “harm” category of the guideline adequately recognises. Inciting a mob to violence is obviously like playing on Vesuvius. But where is the evidence that mobs form because of a stupid tweet? They don’t. Even the much vaunted stat about the views her Tweet got are unreliable – not least as I recall that lots of people were RT and QT-ing idiotic and despicable tweets like this to *condemn* them – esp before the unrest started.
My own view is that even within the SGs, there was far more mitigation than aggravation and her sentence could have been down to 2 years and suspended. And if this is wrong, then we have a serious problem with the SGs. However wicked, a mere statement that isn’t proven to have caused any violence, which is taken down almost immediately by a defendant in a locus poenitentiae, simply should not lead to an immediate custodial sentence, still less one far longer than many violent criminals receive.
If Lucy Connolly is in jail for her tweet, which I acknowledge was dreadful, inflammatory and did incite violence, why are Douglas Murray, Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman and many other prominent public figures not charged, convicted and jailed for words they publish?
None of the people you mention have ever called for immigrants or their homes to be burnt.
I didn’t suggest that they had used identical words but all of them, regularly and repeatedly publish material which is clearly intended to stir up racial or religious hatred and on numerous occasions have used language which implies or suggests violence.
In my view, current implementation of the law has swung too far against free speech but it has to be applied equally across everyone in society and if Lucy Connolly is in jail, so should the people I have identified and other high profile public figures who behave as if they have immunity.
“which is clearly intended to stir up racial or religious hatred “? The only way you can know that is if you have access to the intentions of those who emitted the language. And you have no evidence that there is a causal link between what she tweeted and events that took place after that tweet. Correlation does not become causation simply because you wish it to be.
Whatever the merits of this particular case, clearly words have consequences.
Clearly what she called for happened and there is no getting away from it.
While this case is relatively unusual it seems to me that there is a case for the Sentencing Council to try and develop some sort of ‘evaluation’ system for offences in the same way as the Hay Job Evaluation system works for jobs.
Far from perfect but it would at least attempt to evaluate the relative seriousness of different offences
“Clearly what she called for happened and there is no getting away from it.”
This is to confuse correlation with causality. There is no evidence that her tweet contributed to the riots and it is unlikely that it had any impact at all, yet she was treated as if it had.
The assertion that there is no evidence that her tweet contributed to the riots or had any impact at all is to me unsustainable. Given the number of views of her tweets, the timing and nature of subsequent events it seems to me beyond the bounds of credibility to assert they had no effect. It’s true that the extent of the effect her tweet had is hard if not impossible to assess but surely a good number of rioters did read her post and for those that did it would have had an inflammatory effect . It may be impossible to say how different events without her tweet events would have been but it must have had an exacerbating effect. Whether small or large.
The number of “impressions” on X is hugely misleading, as you don’t have to pause on a message to be counted, it’s enough to scroll past it. Loads of the RTs were people condemning the post. It was up less than 4 hours. And how many of the (in a large number of cases) drunk knucklehead rioters do you think use X? It’s largely a platform used by middle class graduates.
This was a great post to bring clarity on the laws and the chances of the appeal.
I’m not up with UK law really, bit what strikes me immediately is that the quoted law talks of “racial hatred”, and yet the offending tweet did not mention any particular race.
Are “immigrants” or “illegal immigrants” considered a race under the law ?
Matthew, you will find the answer to your question today, 20 May. Judgment is being handed down at 10.30 am.
This brings much-needed and highly welcome clarity to the case – but “something of a press campaign” doesn’t even begin to describe what’s been pumped out by the Telegraph in particular. What we have here is an all-out attack on the judiciary, and indeed on named judges. This doesn’t apply only to the hysterical and egomaniacal articles by the increasingly deranged Allison Pearson but also to the so-called ‘news’ stories too, which are to all intents and purposes editorialising and opinion-mongering. Both are testament to the utter and complete collapse of journalistic standards at the newspaper (although really it can no longer be counted as such). And appalling though all this is, it’s nothing compared to the readers’ comments, which are barely distinguishable from what one would find on the sites of Britain First and the English Defence League
The degree of derangement I would struggle to be worse than this. Ms Pearson has own experience of the variable application of the law, of course
#AManForAllSeasons
Like most civilised, well educated chaps of my age, I’m familiar with the idea that we need jury trials because many lawyers and judges are so lacking in any sense of proportion. Or, I might say, too often lacking in any sense at all.
But it’s only rarely that I start to sympathise with the medieval population of Bury St Edmunds who so despaired of their being routinely bullied by the local Abbey that they captured the Prior, beheaded him, and displayed his head on a pike in the marketplace.
I suppose I’m likely to be dead before there is a thorough-going insurrection in this country, and it might be that the population will be too apathetic to stage one, but if there is one it might well be in the name of correcting various crimes by the ruling class, of which Two Tier Justice is likely to be one.
I’d like to boast that this matter would have been better handled in Scotland but after years of government by Marxist Socialists and then Nationalist Socialists, I don’t suppose such a boast would be at all accurate.
Thank you for a clear, constructive and informative article. Is there any further information regarding the racist content found on her phone prior to July 29th i.e how far back did such comments go?
I suspect that whether or not there were other comments, there’s nothing in the public domain beyond those quoted in the Court of Appeal judgment.
surely in law the court can only consider the facts of the current case, in the US it’s known as the blank pad rule.
Connolly’s real problem is that she pleaded guilty, and so it is taken as admitted that she did indeed intend to stir up racial hatred. Had she pleaded not guilty, she would surely have had a good arguable case in her defence. The tweet was not directed at any racial group – illegal immigrants and asylum seekers are not a race – and the plain English of the words complained of, “set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care”, are not an instruction to anyone to set fire to any hotels, but merely a statement that she would not care if someone did. I think it likely that a properly directed jury would have concluded that there was insufficient evidence of any intent to stir up racial hatred, and would have acquitted her. Who advised her to plead guilty?
As for “Two Tier Justice”, it may be a matter of sentencing guidelines rather than any political pressure on judges, but there is certainly an element of groupthink – compare the response of the establishment to the Black Lives Matter protests with the response to white British people enraged by the murder of children. And the guidelines themselves do seem to take a stricter approach to what the ruling class consider wrongthink than to what most ordinary people would consider far more serious crimes. And then there’s the ongoing failure to deal with the Pakistani grooming gangs (it’s still going on, right now as you’re reading this).
Then people see cases such as that of Sam Gould, Labour councillor and former aide to Wes Streeting. Convicted (on his guilty plea) of indecently exposing himself to two females, one a 13 year old girl, whom he then followed, causing her to knock on a stranger’s door to seek safety. Sentenced to 22 weeks’ imprisonment, suspended for two years – which most people would see as a nonce being let off scot-free. While Lucy Connolly gets 31 months’ immediate custody for a politically incorrect tweet. Is it surprising this makes people angry?
Everything you said is spot on
The judges are using very outdated rules on non crimes
What do you think of the US State Department monitoring her case?
One factor ignored, or let’s be generous and say missed by Matthew, is the actions of the Prime Minister in demanding the CPS prosecute all and sundry, which was done in double quick time, where virtually all of those accused were dragged in front of the court with a couple of days. It appears that most were advised to plead guilty. He also lied when denying it was a terrorist attack, then “hey presto” it comes out weeks later that the accused has terrorist manuals in his possession.
Matthew again misses the point about comparing crimes of a different nature and severity. Take the Rotherham rape gangs where the police, politicians and councillors knew this was going on but did nothing. Even now after 1400 white girls and women have been raped and assaulted a pitiful number of men have been charged, and the time taken to bring any charge can be measured in decades.
Matthew if you do not grasp this huge discrepancy and wave it away as just a matter of law, then I’m afraid you are part of the problem.
An eloquent, authoritative piece, but for one reader, confidence in its opinions are undermined by the omission of necessary apostrophes.