The New York Times has just run a shaming investigation into the UK legal principle of “joint enterprise”, under which people can be charged for crimes they were nowhere near.
The report was humiliating for so many reasons, particularly if you think of the US as the world leader in locking people up for no reason except racism. Black men in the UK are three times more likely to be prosecuted as groups of four or more – the principal measure of a joint enterprise case – than white men. The energy to protest against it was stifled six years ago, when the supreme court ruled that joint enterprise cases were unfair and racially biased – yet nothing changed.
