No, for that moment, he was simply a dad who hadn’t seen his babies for two months.
And then we all got back to shouting.
“FANTASTIC NEWS!” Geert Wilders crowed in all caps, accompanied by a picture of himself in front of a “Free Tommy” banner. “Resistance works.”
“The far right have their Oswald Mosley figure,” wrote the Guardian’s King of Snark, Owen Jones, referring to the leader of British fascists in the 1930s. “It's up to the rest of us to fight back.”
Mike Graham of talkRADIO (not to be confused with the broadcaster and author Michael Graham so beloved by those of us in New England) promised to “blow apart the fraud, the con, the cash cow that is the #TommyRobinson business.” Just tune into his show.
And Rebel Media’s Ezra Levant, who works tirelessly on Mr. Robinson’s behalf, declared “Today's ruling was a vindication of Tommy Robinson, a stunning rebuke of the judge in Leeds.”
So what actually happened last week, and what does the future hold in the case of R v Stephen Yaxley Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson)?
Mr. Robinson was serving a prison sentence for two incidents. Both involved livestreaming outside courthouses as he reported on trials in progress for grooming, the despicable practice of prepping girls as young as eleven years old for service as sex slaves, often by getting them addicted to drugs so they become dependent on their captors. The first incident was in Canterbury, last year. Mr. Robinson received a three month suspended sentence for violating provisions of the Contempt of Court Act which prohibit reporting on certain trials until after the trial is over. The intent is to prevent news accounts that might influence the jury and threaten the integrity of the trial. The second incident was in Leeds on May 25 of this year. Within five hours of his arrest, Mr. Robinson was tried and sentenced to thirteen months in prison—the original three months from Canterbury, now unsuspended, and an additional ten for Leeds. There was no time allowed for Mr. Robinson to summon his own barrister. He was represented by a public defender.
Mr. Robinson appealed the sentences and on Wednesday the Court of Appeals issued its ruling in a twenty-four page judgment penned by no less an eminence than the highest judge in England, Lord Chief Justice the Lord Burnett of Maldon. The bottom line, in the words of a three-page summary, thoughtfully provided by the court, is,
The finding of contempt in Leeds is quashed. All consequential orders fall away. The court remits the matter of alleged contempt at Leeds Crown Court to be heard again before a different judge. The appellant is granted conditional bail pending the rehearing.
Toward the end of a video analysis of the ruling, Mr. Levant, despite his partisanship on Tommy’s side, provides a fair summing up of the appeals court's reasoning:
It was wrong to have a drumhead hearing that very minute. It was wrong not to let Tommy get proper legal counsel. It was wrong not to have Tommy’s legal counsel have a chance to pull together the facts and the law. It was wrong that they did not spell out the particulars of what Tommy allegedly did that was contemptuous—it was wrong. It was wrong that Tommy didn’t know what he was pleading guilty to. It was wrong that the sentencing—from arrest to sentencing—took five hours. It was wrong to have a thirteen month conviction. “Disproportionate” is what this court said. It was wrong that he was sentenced as a criminal, as opposed to just being committed for contempt which is a different thing—it’s a civil offense, there’s no mens rea, there’s no guilty mind.
On the first point, holding the enquiry the same day, Lord Burnett said, "The judge should not have commenced the hearing of contempt proceedings that day. Once the appellant had removed the video from Facebook, there was no longer sufficient urgency to justify immediate proceedings."
For the record, I can find no place where the court says a thirteen month sentence was "disproportionate." What it does say is that, "A sense of proportion must be retained. Where a custodial term of considerable length is being imposed, it should not usually occur so quickly after the conduct which is complained of."
The last point, the distinctions between civil and criminal offenses "have serious consequences" that bear directly on some of the harsh treatment Mr. Robinson complained of in prison. In the words of the court,
The classification of the appellant as a convicted prisoner has had the effect of depriving him of privileges relating to: visits by his doctor or dentist, the freedom to choose what clothes to wear and the absence of restrictions on prison visits and the sending and receipt of letters. We have noted already that under section 258 Criminal Justice Act 2003 a person committed to prison for contempt is entitled to be released unconditionally after serving one half of the term for which he was committed. A convicted prisoner, in contrast, will be subject to release on licence with the attendant risk of recall.
Finally, in this regard, the judge imposed a victim surcharge which, pursuant to The Criminal Justice Act 2003 (Surcharge) (Amendment) Order 2016, is payable only in the event of the passing of a “sentence of imprisonment” and not upon a committal for contempt.
Much of the ruling is based on Part 48 of the Criminal Procedure Rules, which lays out the responsibilities of the court in a contempt enquiry, including that it must “explain, in terms the respondent can understand” exactly what he is being accused of and the possible sanctions the court can impose.
“Procedure” is the key word here. The gist of the Court of Appeals’ ruling is that the Leeds court's errors were procedural. The Court of Appeals did not rule on the substance of the charges against Mr. Robinson, instead returning that to the lower court. So they still hang over Mr. Robinson's head; he is merely out on bail. It was definitely, in Mr. Levant’s words, “a stunning rebuke of the judge in Leeds.” And, as Mr. Levant points out, many of the complaints that Mr. Robinson and his supporters have voiced about the warp speed sentence and the cruel prison conditions, complaints which have been ridiculed by his opponents, have now been vouched for by the Lord Chief Justice. But the ruling is not, by any stretch of the imagination, “vindication.”
What happens next is up to the Attorney General, who has to decide whether or not to pursue a new hearing.
In a previous post, I described Her Majesty’s Government long chain of dubious prosecutions against Mr. Robinson as a “vendetta.” “If the Battle of Britain was, in Churchill’s words, Britain’s finest hour,” I wrote, “then this is its most shameful.” By so scrupulously protecting Mr. Robinson’s right to a fair hearing, Lord Burnett and his colleagues on the Court of Appeals have reclaimed some of England’s honor.
| Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com |
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