Eco-Vandalism Now Legally Acceptable
Greenpeace vandals have been cleared in the UK of damaging a coal station. It’s not that they didn’t do it, it’s that the jury thought they were justified.
The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 [US$ 62,594] worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage.
Jurors accepted defence arguments that the six had a “lawful excuse” to damage property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even greater damage caused by climate change. The defence of “lawful excuse” under the Criminal Damage Act 1971 allows damage to be caused to property to prevent even greater damage – such as breaking down the door of a burning house to tackle a fire.
This act of vandalism was just graffiti…this time. And Greenpeace has now been given license to cost power companies (and the people they service) $62,000 at a shot as many times as they want without repercussions. That is incredibly foolish.
Filed under: Doug • Environment • Global Warming • Judiciary
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Interesting story. According to the news story:
Jurors accepted defence arguments that the six had a “lawful excuse” to damage property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even greater damage caused by climate change. The defence of “lawful excuse” under the Criminal Damage Act 1971 allows damage to be caused to property to prevent even greater damage – such as breaking down the door of a burning house to tackle a fire.
UK law apparently has this “lawful excuse” statute and the jurors felt the circumstances merited the normally illegal action of vandalism.
I wonder, under the lawful excuse law, if the offenders have to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that their actions would reasonably be expected to avert the larger damage? Or whether, in fact, larger damage would reasonably be expected to happen?
That is, one could reasonably justify that breaking through a door (normally a crime) is lawfully excused when a house is on fire because it is pretty obvious that the burning house would cause more damage than the broken door. But how much proof do you have to provide that the “burning house” (whatever that may be – burning coal, in this case) will cause greater damage than the vandalism?
Hmmm, interesting.
I wonder if the US has similar laws and what the parameters are?
I mean, a billion people driving cars can be reasonably expected to cost hundreds of billions (trillions, probably) of dollars in damage, not to mention the millions killed in car wrecks and hundreds of millions injured. Could someone commit vandalism or even “break” cars so they can’t run under this statute?
Very intriguing…
Opens up an incredible can of worms, legally.
And breaking down a door during a fire is explicitly done to achieve some sort of goal that is time-critical, or, in the case of breaking down a door during a law-enforcement action, allowed in order to pursue criminals so as to prevent further crimes. What in the world does graffiti server to accomplish other than free PR?
That’s what I’m wondering – you can understand how knocking down a door can accomplish helping in the case of a fire, but how does vandalism help in the case of global warming or pollution?
I mean, I think a case can be made (and presumably has been, in this case), that by vandalizing the coal company and costing them money, they are making the expenses of running a coal company (which they believe to be contributing to a “burning house”) go up and decreasing the desire to be in that business. But that is not as a direct connection as there is to the door and the burning house.
On the other hand, from an ethical point of view, I would think that those who believe in war-as-defense would recognize this as an extension of their belief – that if you think something is wrong or dangerous, it is okay to use violence to try to bring that thing to an end. One might say that this is a less-deadly, more non-violent response to a perceived evil than waging war.
A legal and ethical can of worms, seems to me.