“This isn’t a court of justice, son, this is a court of law”… and all that. This below from David Harris’s memoir “Dreams Die Hard” is worth remembering as Just Stop Oil people get done for contempt of court for simply explaining to juries what they did, or rather, why they did it.
As a means of pursuing my announced goal of putting the [page break] government on trial, my “intent and bad purpose” strategy was, in fact, hardly adequate. The judge ruled that no testimony about Vietnam, the war there, the foreign policy of the United States, the American peace movement, or the organization called The Resistance was relevant, so the entire defense case, in effect, consisted of me on the witness stand trying to express myself with sufficient abstraction for my testimony to be admissible.
(Harris, 1982:244-245)
(Harris did indeed serve time for draft resistance…)
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