Brighton squat trial — longer update

We are pret­ty shocked to report that the third and last defen­dant was found GUILTY under s144 on May 24. He was sen­tenced to 40 hours unpaid labour and a £250 fine. Pre­vi­ous updates can be found on the roofto­pre­sis­tance web­site. This deci­sion was imme­di­ate­ly appealed and we will let you know the next court date asap.

The mag­is­trates said in their “judge­ment” that:

The defen­dant was a tres­pass­er
The defen­dant was liv­ing there
The build­ing was res­i­den­tial

In sup­port of their claim that the defen­dant lived there, the mag­is­trates said there was show­er gel in the show­er, pots and pans in the kitchen and a light on in the fridge. This is clear­ly far from a legal def­i­n­i­tion of liv­ing, espe­cial­ly since the defen­dant was not actu­al­ly linked to any of the items in any way.

In sup­port of their claim that the build­ing was res­i­den­tial, the mag­is­trates appeared to rely on the tried and trust­ed adage that ‘the police said it was true so it must be true.’ They ignored evi­dence obtained from the Coun­cil that the build­ing had nev­er been con­vert­ed to res­i­den­tial.

What does this mean? We think this means that a judge (or indeed any­one with legal train­ing) will quick­ly over­turn this deci­sion. Mike Weath­er­ly says he is delight­ed that our friend is con­vict­ed. We will be inter­est­ed to hear his reac­tion when our friend returns to hav­ing no con­vic­tions again in about six weeks.

The oth­er two defen­dants had pre­vi­ous­ly had their cas­es dropped on grounds of no case to answer (no com­ment from Weath­er­ly about that). The only dif­fer­ence with the case for the third defen­dant was that a cop claimed the defen­dant had said to him that he lived in the build­ing. This evi­dence was used in court despite not being tak­en under cau­tion (there are grounds for appeal on that alone!) and the mag­is­trates took it as a vol­un­tary con­fes­sion, despite it being dis­put­ed by the defence.

In order to reach this deci­sion, the mag­is­trates appeared to prize the word of one police­man over anoth­er, since although one had claimed that the defen­dant had said he lived in the build­ing, anoth­er said he had not.

In the eyes of these right-wing dip­shits, it is fine for the police to act as prop­er­ty pro­tec­tors, an approach which has already had trag­ic con­se­quences.

All in all, this tri­al was a farce, with untrained mag­is­trates being asked to imple­ment an ill-thought out new law. They failed to do their job prop­er­ly and the only good thing to come out of this con­vic­tion is that hope­ful­ly a decent legal prece­dent will be set on appeal which makes clear what ‘liv­ing’ and ‘res­i­den­tial’ mean in the eyes of the law. We do not doubt that this will lead to our friend’s con­vic­tion being over­turned AND this new law becom­ing unwork­able in prac­tice.

PS Thanks to every­one for their con­tin­ued sup­port and props to the entire pub­lic gallery for walk­ing out when the mag­is­trates unveiled their prej­u­dices.

hous­ing­war at squat dot net
@housingwar