A jury at Snaresbrook Crown Court has resisted a judge’s invitation to convict six medical professionals, charged with ‘criminal damage’, after they broke windows at JP Morgan in July 2022, on the eve of the UK’s record-breaking climate crisis-induced heatwave. Despite more than two days of deliberations and the judge’s direction that they had no legal defence, the jury were unable to agree on a verdict.
The JP Morgan Six: no verdict reached
Just before lunch on Friday 14 June, the jury asked the judge whether a medical emergency could be a lawful excuse, by inference rejecting the prosecutor’s position that the action concerned not objective reality, but ‘political opinion and belief’. The judge told them that in this case it was no defence.
The outcome casts further doubt on the GMC’s position that doctors who take direct action to protect the public from climate breakdown undermine public trust in the profession. It was on this basis that the GMC suspended Dr Sarah Benn from practice in April, after she held a sign saying ‘Stop New Oil’, in breach of an injunction obtained by Valero, the US-based fossil fuels company.
Speaking after the verdict, Dr Alice Clack said:
It’s hard to express what we’re all feeling right now. We’re grateful to the jury for bringing moral sense and humanity into the courtroom.
Their deliberations can’t have been easy given the directions of the judge. The outcome doesn’t bring back the countless lives already lost to JP Morgan’s fossil fuel addiction, in this country and around the world. But it gives an indication of the public support for medical practitioners willing to put their bodies on the line.
The climate crisis is a health crisis. We can’t protect our patients by treating the symptoms, and we won’t stand by while JP Morgan and others cover up the truth and pour petrol on the flames of the climate crisis. It’s our duty as evidence-based professionals to take proportionate and effective action to protect public health.
Today the jury, by refusing the judge’s invitation to find us guilty, has sent a powerful message to the GMC that public trust in the medical profession is not eroded by their engagement in civil disobedience.
Dr Fiona Godlee, former editor in chief of the British Medical Journal, said:
None of these experienced and dedicated doctors and nurses wanted to be up in court on these charges. They wanted to be treating patients and protecting the public as they have sworn to do. But the world is facing an existential climate emergency that threatens our very survival, and our government and corporations like JP Morgan are completely failing us by continuing the madness of investing in fossil fuels. In view of this, I fully understand why these doctors and nurses felt the need to act as they did and I thank them for their leadership and courage.
Action taken ahead of 40˚C heatwave in 2022, which claimed thousands of lives
Taking action against JP Morgan
On 17 July 2022, the group of six medical professionals (two consultants, two GPs and two nurses) knew what was coming. The UK’s record heatwave, that would cause thousands of deaths across the country, in particular among the young, elderly and the vulnerable, most in need of medical care. 19 July 2022 remains the hottest recorded day in UK history, with the mercury hitting 40.3˚C in Coningsby, Lincolnshire.
At 8am that day, Dr Juliette Brown, a consultant psychiatrist, Maggie Fay, a Dementia Specialist Nurse, Dr David McKelvey, a GP, Dr Alice Clack, a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist, Dr Patrick Hart, a GP, and Ali Rowe, a child and adolescent mental health specialist and former mental health nurse, carefully cracked a number of panes of glass at JP Morgan’s offices in Canary Wharf and put up posters which read “IN CASE OF MEDICAL CLIMATE EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS”.
At the time of their action, JP Morgan, the leading financier of the global fossil fuel industry, had poured $384.2bn into the sector since the Paris Agreement on Climate Change called for an urgent reduction of carbon emissions. This despite JP Morgan themselves producing a report, leaked to the press in 2020, warning that climate change was a threat to the survival of the human race. The report also stated:
The human cost of climate change will play out through worsening health outcomes.
Growing number of health professionals arrested
More than 130 health professionals have been arrested for climate protest in the last few years. Information published by the British government on climate change and health in May 2022, which quotes from the Lancet, a leading medical journal, helps explain why so many are ready to risk their livelihoods for the public:
The science is unequivocal; a global increase of 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.
As the International Energy Agency and others have made clear, the new fossil fuel developments being supported by the banking sector in general, and JP Morgan in particular, are inconsistent with keeping warming under 1.5˚C. Medical professionals who understand the catastrophic consequences feel duty-bound to take proportionate action to protect life and public health. In 2019, Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, the leading medical journal, called on all medical practitioners to take direct action:
All health professionals have a duty and obligation to engage in all kinds of non-violent social protest to address the climate emergency’ because it represents ‘the most existential crisis facing our communities in the world today.
In September 2022, the World Health Organisation joined calls for a binding treaty to end what it referred to as the ‘self sabotage’ of addiction to fossil fuels, before prioritising in May 2024 the escalating climate change impacts on health in its next programme of work. The British Medical Journal has reported that air pollution from fossil fuels is causing more than five million deaths a year. Rising temperatures are now driving the spread of mosquito-borne diseases, such as dengue fever, into Europe.
Justice lottery across the country
Following a pattern of jury acquittals in protest cases, some judges have been taking exceptional measures to preclude ‘not guilty’ verdicts, undermining the certainty and predictability that is meant to define the rule of law. In some cases defendants have even been banned from mentioning ‘climate change’ in court, and sent to prison just for doing so.
On the other hand, others have continued to allow defendants to explain their motivation to protect life and health and to defend themselves on that basis. Last November a jury acquitted nine women who broke windows at HSBC in 2021, causing an alleged £500,000 of damage. By the end of 2022 HSBC had committed to end funding for new oil and gas projects.
On the last Friday before the trial begun, Judge Pounder removed all legal defences from the defendants, changing the legal goal-posts at the last minute and frustrating prior trial preparation.
On Wednesday 12 June, at Inner London Crown Court, Judge Silas Reid sentenced a group of five women who had also broken windows at JP Morgan for the same reason. He imprisoned Amy Pritchard, one of them, for 10 months, suspending the sentences of the others.
In doing so, Judge Reid remarked “none of you pleaded guilty despite your obvious guilt”, a comment contradicted not only by the verdict of this jury, but by others such as the jury who acquitted nine women at Southwark Crown Court last year who broke windows at HSBC.
Indeed, the five women were only found guilty after Judge Reid had warned the jury they could face criminal prosecution if they applied their conscience to the case, prompting an anonymous King’s Counsel to tell Private Eye:
I’ve never encountered a judge threatening jurors in the way that Judge Silas Reid did. That suggests a clear determination by him to deter them from returning a verdict independently.
The case is being appealed to the Court of Appeal on the basis that Judge Reid’s warning to the jury was unlawful, and led to a formal complaint to the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office, signed by more than 1,800 people including naturalist and broadcaster Chris Packham.
Featured image supplied
