Press Releases & Updates 2002

Heather Stewart (18) and Adam Conway (23) had been part of a small protest in August 2001 at the Coulport nuclear weapons depot. They argued that their action had been peaceful and had caused less disruption than the action for which the High Court recently upheld Tommy Sheridan’s acquittal and, like his, did not amount to the "genuine alarm and serious disturbance" required for a breach of the peace. Despite this, Justice of the Peace Fraser Gillies, who had last week acquitted another protester in almost identical circumstances, fined them £120 and £175 respectively. Both are appealing the verdict.

Adam said "Fraser Gillies clearly doesn’t understand either Smith v. Donnelly or the significance of the High Court upholding Tommy Sheridan’s acquittal. To say that 400 people sitting in the road is legal but four people doing the same thing isn’t is nonsensical."

Trident Ploughshares comment: "Although it is risking one’s sanity to attempt to follow a thread of logic through the rambling judgments of this weird court, the best guess is that the court clerks, under who knows what pressure, have now decided to advise the magistrates to go for convictions on the basis that all these cases are really different when everyone knows that the essentials are the same. If so, they are just heaping up trouble for themselves in terms of a flood of appeals, more knock-backs and criticisms in the High Court and the end of our sorely tried patience with a shameful system that has not been loyal either to the law or human values, but only to a state willing to carry out mass murder."

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