Nottingham 114 Update

If the trial will not be heard by a jury it may as well not take place at all. The law society (closed shop union) oligarch will simply impose there will up on their subjects.

As far as I understand conspiracy cases can only be heard in a crown court and therefore any trial will be in front of a jury

The necessity defence worked well at Kingsnorth where they were accused of criminal damage. It didn't work at Drax where they were accused of stopping a train or some such.

Solidarity but you need to consider your defence.

The "necessity defense" didn't work at Drax because the judge ruled it "not allowed".
Now what is the point of a jury if the judge is permitted to censor the evidence.
There must be a jury and the jury must consider all the evidence that the defense and prosecution want to be considered, otherwise a fair trial will not have taken place.

All eyes need to be on the courts, they get away with far to much.
The justice industry is profit led and politically funded.

This is what i'm talking about - the Judge was able to rule it out as there is no defence of necessity in the offence they were charged with at Drax - just as there is no defence of necessity to aggravated trespass (which BTW was what the Kingsnorth defendants were charged and convicted off after they were acquitted of criminal damage)
People can pontificate about what should happen but if you ignore the basic rules you will inevitably be convicted - unless that is what you want you need to think carefully and take good advice when considering a defence.
Crossing you finger and making speeches about how unjust the process is doesn't count.

Doubtless the alleged protesters are consulting with lawyers, who will have a clearer sense than people on this site of what defences could be used.

Since necessity is a civil law defence, it is surely available in principle for all offences, and will depend whether the judge decides to permit it? It can't just exist for some offences and not others. If judges decide to rule it out in a particular case this is pretty much arbitrary. There are cases where necessity defence for aggravated trespass has been permitted in court, e.g. a Greenpeace case in 2004 - so it is not simply impermissible in principle.

However, in this case I suspect the whole thing will come down to whether 'conspiracy' can be used in this kind of broad and clearly repressive way. It has been used a few times in animal rights cases with more serious charges, and used a lot historically, BUT it has quite often failed in court for various reasons, either for lack of evidence that the defendants were 'beyond reasonable doubt' planning to do something illegal and were all in on it, or because the offence is deemed to be of a kind which conspiracy can't be applied to, usually because it is already a 'group' offence. Various EDO charges for conspiracy to cause criminal damage were either dropped or found not guilty, and the Gandalf case also ultimately failed; in addition, Sean Kirtley was acquitted on appeal.

'Necessity defence' implies admitting that one has done something which would otherwise be a crime. Hence it would rule out challenging the indirect inferences of intent to commit a crime which will be key to the prosecution case.

Also note that there are times when loudly protesting the injustice of the options permitted and persistently trying to introduce options or defences which the judge rules out is sometimes an effective strategy for giving juries a sense of the injustice of a prosecution, raising costs of the trial, making political persecution visible and drawing media attention to a case. This effectively led to acquittals in the Yippie cases after the 1968 Democratic Convention in America, and has regularly been done in Black Nationalist related cases.

This case needs to be watched carefully - if the state manages to convict, the effect will be to give the green light to routine use of pre-emptive raids and charging of protesters who are arrested before anything happens. We would also be likely to see Italian-style prosecutions for alleged conspiracies by organisations which don't exist to carry out acts which would probably never have happened, on the basis that people have certain political views. If the state fails to convict, it could roll-back the use of pre-emptive arrests.