Thread by @gardencourtlaw

WE ARE LIVE! Prof @_lesliethomas QC of GC, the first Black Professor of Law at @GreshamCollege, is speaking tonight at his FREE public lecture series 'Race, Colonialism & Power in the Legal System'

2nd in the series: 'Judicial Racism & the Lammy Review' bit.ly/3lIoleB

"Most people know that the English legal system has long had a race problem. Yet, we often attribute this to policing only, allowing the wider justice system – judges in particular – to get off scot-free...

...However, judicial racism has, and still does, play a critical role in perpetuating #racialinequity."

"First, I’m going to look at the history of judicial racism, for this lecture is as much about history as it is about law."

"The presence of Black people in Britain is not a recent phenomenon. As long ago as 1596, Elizabeth I’s Privy Council issued a proclamation authorising a Lubeck merchant called Casper van Senden to take “blackamoors” from England and sell them as slaves in Spain and Portugal"

"During the seventeenth & eighteenth centuries, Britain profited greatly from the trans-Atlantic slave trade, abducting huge numbers of people from Africa and enslaving them in its American & Caribbean colonies."

"By the eighteenth century there were numerous Black people in Britain itself, some of whom had been purchased overseas as slaves and brought here to work for wealthy families."

"It wasn’t until the Slave Trade Act 1807 that the slave trade was abolished in England. And not until 1833, with the Slavery Abolition Act, that slavery itself was formally abolished."

"Let’s turn to the criminal law, specifically the courts & judges. At the end of the 18th & the beginning of the 19th century, criminal law sanctions handed out by local magistrates & Crown Court judges were particularly brutal – often called the ‘bloody code’."

"A huge number of offences, including damaging Westminster Bridge and impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner, were punishable by death. Public hangings, transportation to the colonies, and whipping were all everyday practices."

"Historian Norma Myers, in a study of Old Bailey court records, has documented the stories of Black people who came before the criminal court in the late eighteenth & early nineteenth centuries, including many who were transported to Australia."

"Myers’ work underscored the extreme harshness of the criminal law of the time - for Black defendants, Irish defendants, but also for the English White working-class... the most common offence for which people were transported to Australia was the theft of a handkerchief."

"At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, eugenics was very much in vogue in Britain & America. The central tenet of eugenics was that some humans were genetically superior, while others were genetically inferior...

...Many eugenicists divided human beings into “Caucasoid”, “Mongoloid” &“Negroid” races, who were all believed to have different characteristics, with the so-called “Negroid” race being at the bottom of the pile."

"Let’s move on to the post-war decades. Between the 1940s & 60s, large numbers of Black & Asian people came to Britain from the Commonwealth... This era was a high point of racial tensions."

"Until the Race Relations Act was passed in 1968, it was common for landlords and businesses to display signs saying, “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs”. The vicious racism of this era resulted in the enactment of the Commonwealth Immigrants Acts 1962, 1968 & Immigration Act 1971."

"This era was also a real high point of police corruption. While this affected working-class people of all races, it fell most heavily on Black people & people of colour, who were persecuted by the police."

"And unfortunately, the infallible image of the “British bobby” permeated the attitudes of judges. Time after time, the judiciary allowed the police to get away with it and the prosecution to present cases that would now be dismissed, potentially for an abuse of process."

"We only have to look at some of the most well-known miscarriage of justice cases involving police corruption & the deliberate framing of Black people. Take, for instance, the Stockwell Six & the Oval Four, all of whom had their convictions recently overturned by the CoA."

"Meanwhile, my own career at the Bar started in the 1980s. I have represented many Black people & people of colour who have been assaulted, harassed or falsely accused by police officers, or whose family members have been killed by police officers."

"Now I will move to the second part of the lecture: judicial racism TODAY. You might think that the examples I’ve given in this lecture are about the distant past. But judicial racism is still very much with us...

... and still influences the fate of the many Black and minority ethnic people who come before the courts as criminal defendants, civil litigants, victims of crime and bereaved families and survivors."

"Judicial racism in the criminal courts is pronounced when looking at sentencing practices. The Government’s 2017 commissioned Lammy Review by @DavidLammy MP comprehensively lay bare this truth...

... “[u]nder similar criminal circumstances the odds of imprisonment for offenders from self-reported Black, Asian, and Chinese or other backgrounds were higher than for offenders from self-reported White backgrounds.” "

"It also found “[w]ithin drug offences, the odds of receiving a prison sentence were around 240% higher for BAME offenders, compared to White offenders.” "

"The picture for “BAME” children is even more depressing, where judicial discretion is leading to real problems. Take for instance remand – where someone is imprisoned pending a trial...

... Last year, @TransformJust1 & @TheHowardLeague revealed that between July & September 2020, 87% of children on remand in London were from a BAME background, while 61% were Black."

"A recent report by @_YJB also paints a worrying picture for BAME children, concluding that BAME children are:
•more likely to receive custodial remand as opposed to bail.
•less likely to benefit from out-of-court disposals

•more likely to receive a custodial sentence and the length of the sentence is likely to be longer
•more likely to be subject to harsher requirements if a Youth Rehabilitation Order is imposed"

"By contrast, the Lammy Review described juries as a “success story”. (The Review) found that jury conviction rates were very similar across different ethnic groups. BAME & White conviction rates were similar across a range of offence-types."

"This data confirmed what many working lawyers know from our anecdotal experience: judges are, on average, more racially prejudiced than juries."

"But jurors can of course also be influenced by race – often by racist tropes, stereotypes & unfairly prejudicial evidence. Take for instance the use of Drill music in cases involving predominantly Black boys accused of gang-related crime."

"Simply being in a Drill music video on YouTube can become “persuasive” evidence for the prosecution when trying to convince the jury of their case. Check out the Garden Court Chambers six-part YouTube series on this topic - bit.ly/3mTyq7R "

"The West has long had a race problem, but equally relenting is the West’s denial of this problem. Racists & racist violence are treated as outliers. And using the term ‘institutional racism’ is shunned as ‘unhelpful’, or outright rejected."

"From Met Commissioner Cressida Dick to the Government’s recent Sewell Report, issues of racism and racial inequality continue to be refuted."

"But judicial decision making has itself played a critical role in the silencing of race, especially in cases involving violence & where the state is implicated, but also our senior judiciary, inquests, public inquiries as well as other fact-finding & accountability processes."

As @ECRI_CoE underlined in 2016: “racially-motivated aspects of cases are often filtered out by the police, CPS or judiciary through a combination of unwillingness to recognise racist motivation, the reclassifying of racist attacks as disputes or other forms of hostility.”

2004 @HumanRightsCtte report stated “the unsafe use of restraint is an ongoing problem across all forms of detention” & “the possibility that racial stereotyping has been a contributory factor in at least some deaths in custody resulting from restraint should be taken seriously”.

"For over 30 years, inquests have offered the only opportunity to officially establish whether racism contributed to a person’s death; however, in my experience, they have consistently failed in ensuring transparency and true accountability."

"An inquest into the death of a Black person in state custody has never explicitly concluded that racism (whether that be individual prejudice, or institutional racism) contributed to a person’s death."