A Bristol jury acquitted four activists who were charged with property damage for their involvement in the June 2020 overturning of the decades-controversial monument to Skaven merchant and patron Edward Colston (1636-1721).
The judgment, which is jokingly described as “monumental”, makes waves because some see it as an incentive for imagery.
Critics also complain that the lines between law and personal sympathy have been blurred.
Gina Thomas
Features correspondent based in London.
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One would have thought that the fall of a monument by a mob was a clear case, especially since the four defendants confessed to the act. However, they denied having caused property damage because their actions were justified. Three of them even claimed that the statue had increased in value after it was recovered from the harbor basin and placed in the museum.
The defense was based largely on the moral motives of the four activists, who, one of them explained, acted out of love for their fellow human beings. The monument to the merchant of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who was described as a racist and murderer, is, in its obscenity, tantamount to a hate crime. By demolishing the "Monument to Racism", he had prevented a crime against the citizens of Bristol, justified a defendant who said that the Colston Monument was comparable to a statue of Hitler placed in front of a Holocaust survivor's nose . The jury was also raised on concerns that a conviction against the articles of UK human rights law protecting freedom of thought, freedom of conscience,Freedom of religion and freedom of assembly would be violated.
Experiences of racism in the foreground
The proceedings could have been negotiated by a local court, where a judge decides the outcome. The defendants preferred a jury and relied on their defense counsel's ability to convince the twelve men and women on the jury box of the legitimacy of their protest. To this end, the lawyers brought the experiences of black citizens with racism in Great Britain and the history of Edward Colston to the fore. In the politicized trial, it was as if history and the winners of the slave trade had been posthumously charged with crimes that were not considered as such by the standards of the time. As an expert witness, the historian David Olusoga explained to the court, naming thousands of Africans,who did not survive transatlantic transport at the time of Colston's participation in the Royal Africa Society, the horrors of human trafficking.
After the acquittal, Olusoga expressed his satisfaction with the finding of an English jury that the "real crime" had been to leave a memorial to a mass murderer standing for 125 years. One of the defendants rejoiced that the story had been corrected.
Jonathan Sumption, a former Supreme Court judge, is not the only one to deny the activists' claim to direct violence if necessary to assert their moral values. Sumption condemned the actions of the acquitted, referred to as the "Colston Four" in reference to the victims of various legal errors related to terrorist attacks by the IRA, as sheer masturbation. The activists had shown the strength of their feelings. As a historical phenomenon, slavery is significant, argues Sumption, but the strength of feeling about it is not. In the Colston debate, the mind has a hard time countering the power of feeling, which has pent-up over decades because Bristol, regardless of modern sensibilities, insistedTo pay homage to their benefactors, like the Victorians once did, as "one of the most virtuous and wisest sons of their city".