Thread by @kirkkorner

Sarah Everard vigil attendees face Met Police prosecution under Covid lockdown rules standard.co.uk/news/crime/sar…

This is what the charge looks like. It is due to go before a magistrate in Westminster today

The Met was contacted for comment, but has not done so yet.
The charges come against a backdrop of this court defeat for the force yesterday:
standard.co.uk/news/uk/met-po…

This is what #OpenJustice looks like in 2022.

1.These prosecutions are not (currently) being dealt with in open court.
They are in the Single Justice Procedure, and today’s court events will happen behind closed doors

2.These vigil prosecutions are not publicly listed.
Today’s Westminster published list is surprisingly short (four defendants' names) and does not contain any of these cases

3.Even if these prosecutions were on the published list, members of the public would have no idea what they relate to.
And as previously stated, there would be no open hearing for members of the public to find out more.

4.I have spent the last two days trying to find out more details of the Met’s allegations in these prosecutions.
Journalists have a right to see court documents, but my requests have so far gone unanswered

5.The HMCTS guidelines say that requests for SJP documents will be dealt with within one working day.
Yet they rarely are, the system is likely to be under-resourced, and the MoJ press office says it can’t do much if emails go unanswered

6.The outcome of these prosecutions might not be known until seven days’ time.
Due to the Bank Holiday, the earliest I can expect to know the outcome by phone is Monday.
Justice will have been done effectively in secret for five days.

7.Courts in London often forget to send out the results of their cases, which is supposed to be regular and routine.
Again, this may be a resource issue. But when you're doing justice in closed courts, the safeguard of telling journalists what you’ve done is incredibly important

The MoJ and the Attorney General chose to allow Covid prosecutions in closed courts. In the early days of the pandemic, there was a safety reason. Now it’s done for expediency.
Met Police chose to prosecute these (and many other) cases in the SJP system

And perhaps most important of all, the Met chose to bring prosecutions in these particular cases, when no one would have noticed if the charges were quietly dropped

In March, a government minister portrayed SJP as a beacon of transparency, better even than Open court

So far on the vigil prosecutions, there’s:

No open hearing
No result of today’s proceedings
No documents provided

MPs should know what “greater transparency” looks like

It also appears that one of the people being prosecuted had no idea she was the subject of a criminal case, until contacted by the media.

That, sadly, is a recurring theme of the Single Justice Procedure