In April 2021, I was one of six Extinction Rebellion protesters acquitted of criminal damage to Shell’s London HQ. Two years earlier, we poured fake oil onto the steps and walls of the oil major’s building in Waterloo, broke windows and painted messages that said: “Shell Knew”, “Shell Lies” and “Shell Kills”. Then we waited for police to come and arrest us. The story of how we persuaded a jury to find us not guilty, in defiance of the judge and the law, has now been dramatized for Radio 4.
We weren’t surprised that our case ended up in the Crown Court in front of a jury, rather than in the magistrates’ court before a judge or lay panel. We planned it that way. We knew that if we caused more than five thousand pounds worth of damage we would have the opportunity to put our case to 12 random Londoners.
Our trial took place against a backdrop of hostility towards climate protesters from the government and the media. We are derided in the press as crusties, sloanes or extremists. The police has taken an increasingly hardline attitude and the Home Secretary is trying to push through new restrictions on public protest.
But we were sure that if we could just talk directly to a group of ordinary people like us - and explain to them the severity of the threat posed by climate change and the need for urgent, drastic action - they would understand why we did what we did and would give us their support. Our experience wasn’t a one-off. In the months since our acquittal, other juries hearing other Extinction Rebellion cases have also returned not guilty verdicts.
Before our trial began, the judge was clear he was likely to rule we had no defence. To give ourselves the best chance, we did something that might seem surprising. We sacked our lawyers. By self-representing we were able to address the jury ourselves from the lawyers’ benches, rather than through barristers while sitting in the dock.
The prosecution’s case was straightforward, the evidence of guilt apparently indisputable. There was video footage of the entire action, recording what each of us had done. The building’s owners were adamant we did not have permission. None of us disputed the facts. The jury must have thought their decision would be easy, that they would be home within a few days. In fact, the trial took two full weeks.
When it came to our turn to defend ourselves there were limits to what we could say. We were allowed to talk about who we were, what we had done, and why. We couldn’t give a lecture on the disaster of climate breakdown, but we could speak about our ‘subjective belief’ that it was taking place. Similarly, we couldn’t tell the jury about Shell’s wickedness, how it had lied for decades about what it knew about the effects of burning fossil fuels, and the damage its drilling had done to environments and communities around the world, but we were allowed to say why we wrote what we did on the walls of the company’s HQ. Each of us is a different character, and each of us had a different story to tell.
It is a strange, quite primitive experience to face a jury of your peers and explain your actions to them directly – the way I imagine it might happen in a tribe or a mediaeval village. With the mystification of the law removed, it was an intensely personal interaction, even with the judge’s many interruptions. Our jury reflected the diversity of London: mostly young, ethnically diverse, the majority women. I felt glad to be in their hands.
When it came time for the judge to deliver his summing up, he told the jury that whatever their feelings, the law was clear. Nothing we had said constituted a legal defence, but even so, he could not direct them to find us guilty. The decision was for them alone. And then each of us were able to give a closing statement. They were all very different, none of us disputed the evidence or even claimed we knew we were right.
After the jury cleared us, some of the press coverage commented on our ingenious tactics. But they were no such thing. There wasn’t even much by way of eloquence or persuasion. What happened over the two weeks was that we shared something with the jurors – our understanding of the science, yes, but also our vulnerability, our grief at what was happening to the planet and the people who live on it, and our gratitude to them for listening.
During their deliberations, the jurors asked to be reminded of the oath they had sworn – which was to deliver a true verdict according to the evidence they had heard. This is the wonder of English common law and trial by jury: for all that the court is dominated by a judge and by that judge’s interpretation of the law, jurors still swear to base their verdict on the evidence, the ordinary words of the ordinary people before them. We should all be grateful to them for their attention and their bravery.
And that is what makes these recent jury decisions so compelling. After two years of listening to, and possibly nodding along with, that relentless media message, groups of random members of the public, listen to the evidence and deliver verdicts which can be understood as giving their support to actions for which the law says there is no defence. To silently defy the insistence of the Crown and the strong guidance of a judge takes no little courage; to change your mind about XR takes courage too.
