Ricky Jones and the reality of two-tier justice

Spectator

2 days ago

This may be looked back on as the week when two-tier justice moved from being an accusation to a statement of incontrovertible fact. The stark difference in treatment of Ricky Jones, the former Labour councillor accused of encouraging violent disorder as he mimed a throat being cut at a protest and Lucy Connolly, the mother who sent a nasty tweet shortly after the Southport massacre, is no conspiracy theory, despite the state's best efforts to pretend it is.
To recap, Jones was filmed at an anti-racism rally after the Southport riots calling protestors 'disgusting Nazi fascists', and said 'We need to cut their throats and get rid of them'. Lucy Connolly received a 31-month prison sentence for sending an unpleasant tweet about migrant hotels (which she promptly deleted) saying, 'Set fire to all the f*****g hotels full of the bastards for all I care [emphasis added].' Given the caveat at the end of this sentence, it is debatable that this was a tweet which did much to incite anything.
For what it's worth, I don't believe either individual should have been locked up for their speech, but if the state must do so, it needs to be seen as even-handed. This is a profoundly damaging moment, both for the government and for public trust in the judicial system – what little there was to begin with.
By way of mitigating circumstances, Jones's defence argued that he may have been affected by ADHD, and suffered from 'emotional arousal' which could 'override deliberate decision-making' (which presumably therefore made it harder to understand the impact of calling for throats to be slit). Lucy Connolly's potential mitigations as the mother of a young daughter, who had previously lost her infant son in tragic circumstances which naturally made her sensitive to the news of murdered children, seem not to have mattered as much.
One important difference is that, whereas Lucy Connolly pleaded guilty last summer, Ricky Jones fought his charges in court (defended by a silk from Garden Court chambers). But this only points to a further aspect of two-tier justice; namely, who has the means to fight their case. The privately-paid solicitor will naturally make sure his privately-paying client is aware of all the defences available to him. By contrast, the harried duty solicitor is not exactly best-placed to give considered advice.
Either way, I suspect few who hear about these two cases will care very much about distinctions like guilty and not guilty pleas. Most will simply compare the two 'offences' with the respective punishments doled out, and judge for themselves.
Crucially, like most of those arrested at the time, Lucy Connolly was denied bail. Facing a potential delay of months inside while awaiting trial, she may have felt that she had no choice but to plead guilty to the charges laid before her. This element of potential coercion was perhaps the starkest example of 'two-tier justice'. Since Jones was granted bail, he had more than a year to prepare his defence after multiple delays to his trial. Two-tier justice exists across multiple realities and manifestations; from the granting of bail to financial disparity – not to mention the fact that activist lawyers are sometimes only too happy to waive fees where they agree with the accused.
While dismissing Lucy Connolly's appeal to her sentence in May this year, Lord Justice Holroyde went out of his way to praise her solicitor. 'He struck us as a conscientious defence lawyer with a clear grasp of the relevant law, practice and procedure and a realistic appraisal of the issues in the case.' The fact that Connolly, like other defendants charged with stirring up racial hatred post-Southport, may well have been cleared by a jury had it gone to trial, should surely call into question the advice she received. Lord Justice Holroyde's praise gives the uneasy impression of lawyers looking out for their own.
The judiciary obviously cannot control the decisions of the jury that acquitted Mr Jones in a court of law, and nor should it. Yet some of the inevitable backlash we will now see might perhaps have been avoided had Lucy Connolly received greater clemency from the UK state. So long as she remains incarcerated for what appears a manifestly less serious offence, it will be harder than ever to argue that UK justice remains intact.
A few weeks ago, Tony Diver at the Telegraph published an extraordinary story, revealing more about the activities of a secretive wing of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, known as the National Security and Online Information Team. Among other things this team monitors social media for evidence of 'narratives' they deem 'concerning', including, it turned out accusations of 'two-tier policing'. As we speak, civil servants will be trawling the internet for evidence of an alleged 'narrative' which now looks increasingly impossible to deny.