Let that be a lesson, never block the highways without a tractor
this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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It was chilling. People were wishing her to get run over.
If they decide to jail Cressida Gethin then they make the argument that this type of annoying / nuisance protest won't change anything (either).
But then what comes next?
Surrender to the inevitability of catastrophes, famines, conflicts, genocides and wars, including the increasing possibility of nuclear war? A young person faces 50 years of constant global decline. The murder of hope. There is still a massive climate lie in that the consequences of climate chaos aren't registering.
So ... what was the sentences?
She was found guilty, but not sentenced yet. The act for which she is found guilty is listed :
(4)A person guilty of an offence under subsection (1) is liable— (a)on summary conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months, to a fine or to both; (b)on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 10 years, to a fine or to both.
Hopefully just a fine, but choosing to represent herself was a bad idea.
Hopefully just a fine, but choosing to represent herself was a bad idea.
Yeah..... I'm still on the fence about this organization. The tinfoil hat wearing part of me finds it awfully suspicious that this student is the only one being taken to court, despite her not being the organizer.
Why is she defending herself in court if she represents a ngo with funding? Why doesn't Just Stop Oil utilize some of their funding from their primary funder Climate Emergency Fund to defend their own people?
Hell, CEF is run by a Getty and a Kennedy...... Why are they sending kids to face prosecution and abandoning them?
Idk, I guess I just don't trust a billionaire oil heiress or a modern Kennedy to actually care about anything but themselves.
Huh. Just learned that criminal jury trials don't have to be unanimous in the UK.
I also just learned that until recently the were two states in the US that didn't require unanimous jury decisions in criminal cases. Can you guess what states and why it was changed? (Hint: has to do with racism)
Further hint: https://www.quora.com/Do-juries-always-have-to-be-unanimous-in-their-verdict
Up until 2020 and Ramos v Louisiana, where the US Supreme Court ruled that criminal trials had to have unanimous juries to convict, no. Since then a criminal jury has to be unanimous to convict on criminal charges. Civil cases can still be by majority vote.
In the 1960s the Supreme Court started prohibiting the routine exclusion of blacks on juries. To get around this, some states, including Oregon, allowed guilty verdicts on 10–2 or 11–1 jury votes (there would only be a token black juror or two and allowing a less-than-unanimous vote would allow the white jurors to ignore the black jurors). In Ramos, the Supreme Court ruled the proof quantum — beyond reasonable doubt — required unanimous jury verdicts. However, in Edwards v Vannoy, a case out of, IIRC, Texas, in 2021, the Supreme Court ruled the Ramos ruling would not have retroactive effect which means there are inmates in prison who were convicted by a non-unanimous jury.
Civil cases, because the proof quantum is a preponderance of the evidence or, a middle ground, clear and convincing evidence, unanimous juries are not always required — check on your personal judicial jurisdiction.
To be acquitted, or found “not guilty,” and double jeopardy attach requires a unanimous vote. But, and particularly after Ramos, all it takes is one juror to hang the jury. If a jury is hung, meaning there aren't enough votes to convict or acquit and further debate will be fruitless, then trial is declared a mistrial but double jeopardy does not attach. This means the prosecutor can retry the case until s/he gets a conviction or acquittal. In minor felonies, the costs and caseload of pending cases might mean the prosecutor won't retry, but in major cases, such as murder, that option is on the books…
An exercise in game theory:
- first protester: blocks the road personally
- state: sends the protester to jail
- second protester: drops caltrops, hopefully on a slow-driving road
- state: huffs and puffs, but won't find the person
That wouldn't be a smart way to play this game. :( As long as civilized protest gets the goods (or has some effect), one should always prefer that. It's short-sighted to remodel the playing field to make it dangerous.
I hope the sentence will be something ridiculously small, because otherwise state is sending out a signal "you shouldn't get caught, consider real sabotage instead of civilized protest".
Since we're talking game theory, a basic rule in any competitive game (from chess to League of Legends) is that focusing on loss prevention is a losing tactic.
We've been doing peaceful protest since the beginning of the environmental movement. It's not getting the goods and the earth is dying. What we need it's a diversity of tactics.
Exactly. While the majority of human social games are nonzero sum, playing against the oil industry is zero sum. In order for human life to continue to exist, the oil industry must not exist. This is an extermination game.
Within a zero sum game, there's no room to deal or ask for concessions because the survival of each side depends on winning. Corporations focus on immediate profits, so they don't account for the long term. It's useless to think about them as rational actors, because they are not. They have one objective and they are not capable of accounting for the long term effects of that because if they did, they couldn't exist anyway. If the political system is poisoned by the oil industry, then protests can't really work. This game is the same game as nuclear war, after the war has started. Asking to stop the war at that point wouldn't make any sense. The only way to survive is to destroy the enemy, as fast as possible, by any means necessary. To not do everything possible to end petroleum is to accept death.