Tommy Robinson was arrested while reporting on a grooming gang trial in the UK. Shortly after a judge ruled that the press in the UK cannot talk about this. The ruling goes so far to even block people from posting too much on social media about what happened.Can the UK really do this? What does this mean for free speech in the UK?Support the show (http://timcast.com/donate) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| The other day, while reporting on a grooming gang case in the UK, Tommy Robinson was arrested, and apparently he was sentenced to 13 months in prison. | ||
| Shortly after his arrest, a judge ordered that no one could talk about it. | ||
| And so, subsequently, dozens of news outlets, or a dozen plus, started pulling down all of their articles talking about what happened. | ||
| And you can imagine what happened next. | ||
| Everyone started talking about it. | ||
| So, to better understand what is going on with this, I reached out to a lawyer, Will Chamberlain, and we are going to have a discussion about Tommy Robinson and his case, and what this means for technology and the freedom of the press. | ||
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| So I'm joined now by Will Chamberlain. | ||
| Do you want to just introduce yourself? | ||
| Like, what do you do? | ||
| Yeah, I'm a lawyer and commentator in Washington, D.C., formerly the executive director of Maga Meetups. | ||
| The other day you put out this thread about Tommy Robinson and the restrictions, so I don't know if you want to elaborate on that and just kind of tell us what you were talking about, because I know a lot of people were sharing it, and a lot of people are saying what the UK has done in terms of Tommy Robinson is like 1984, you know, it's scary. | ||
| Right, so yesterday Tommy Robinson To my understanding, got thrown in prison for a 13-month jail sentence after he was arrested for a breach of the peace. | ||
| He was apparently live streaming outside of a courthouse and interviewing or harassing defendants. | ||
| I don't even know what the actual facts of the matter are, which connects to the second issue, which is that after imposing this sentence, the judge in the case imposed reporting restrictions banning Publications from discussing or publishing any reports of the proceedings in Tommy's case. | ||
| So let me stop you right here, and I'll just say... Tommy was apparently arrested a while ago, and the judge issued an 18-month sentence with, I think, 13 months suspended or something like that. | ||
| And what happened was... I think it was a 3-month suspended sentence is my understanding, but it was suspended for 18 months, meaning that... | ||
| Uh, meaning that Tommy, if he was kept his nose clean for 18 months, the three month sentence would go away. | ||
| But that was just a year ago. | ||
| So now they're actually giving him a full 13 months on top of what he was originally supposed to get? | ||
| I, my reading is that he, they, they basically the suspended sentence became unsuspended and then they tacked on an additional 10 months for good measure. | ||
| Uh, because it looks like that what he got arrested for yesterday was Essentially the same very similar to what he had been arrested for a year ago Which is interviewing people outside of a courthouse Or in and I think in the first first case he was actually filming himself inside the courthouse Which is a no-no everywhere. | ||
| Yeah, but but the the severity of the sentence and sort of also the the fact that it was just imposed on sui sponte, which is normal for contempt proceedings, | ||
| we'll talk about that later, but the severity of the sentence | ||
| without any sort of jury trial and how fast it happened is really pretty remarkable, even from what reading | ||
| I've done on English law. | ||
| Yeah, so that's an important thing too. | ||
| We're talking about the UK, right? | ||
| And that's just our cousin across the pond. | ||
| But the reporting restrictions are what kind of freaked everybody out because all of a sudden, you know, like a dozen plus news organizations deleted all their articles about what happened. | ||
| You know, so do you want to elaborate on what you were talking about yesterday in terms of the restrictions? | ||
| Yeah, so reporting restrictions are a phenomenon in the UK. | ||
| The UK takes the right to a fair trial far more seriously than it does freedom of speech. | ||
| And so they look at things like the OJ Simpson trial and any sort of publication of trials in | ||
| America as this incredible injustice to criminal defendants, because the idea is that criminal | ||
| defendants shouldn't have to deal with the potential for the criminal defendants shouldn't | ||
| have to deal with the possibility that jurors are going to come in and be biased about the outcomes. | ||
| The problem is that the way that the UK deals with this problem to protect | ||
| juries from contamination is by using the hammer of criminal contempt to ban anybody from talking | ||
| about cases when there's a potential for juror contamination. | ||
| In some cases, this still might be justifiable. | ||
| You can imagine that in a very contentious rape trial, for instance. | ||
| It would be very difficult to have a truly uncontaminated jury pool if there's national news reporting. | ||
| So you can understand some of the reasoning why a law like this might exist, even if it deeply offends our notions of freedom of the press. | ||
| What's remarkable about this case, though, is that the judge imposed a restriction on talking about Tommy's conviction and Tommy's case. | ||
| That's strange because Tommy has already been thrown in jail. | ||
| There's no jury trial for criminal contempt. | ||
| Meaning that what's happened effectively is that the judge has already sentenced Tommy, convicted and sentenced Tommy to 13 months in prison and subsequently banned anybody from talking or criticizing that action in the United Kingdom. | ||
| That strikes me as a remarkable abuse of power. | ||
| Wasn't the restriction set to end not when Tommy gets out of jail, but when this other grooming gang trial ends? | ||
| Something like that? | ||
| Am I wrong? | ||
| Yes, the restriction is set to end when the other grooming trial ends. | ||
| And I'm not sure when that will be. | ||
| Somebody messaged me saying it actually wouldn't be that long. | ||
| And I suppose the argument then would be that talking about Tommy's case could possibly prejudice this other trial. | ||
| That wasn't made clear in the order and the order that the judge put out explicitly talks about these proceedings, these proceedings referring to Tommy's case. | ||
| So I'm not sure that's actually what's happening. | ||
| But moreover, even if that's true, There's ways to tailor these orders, these gag orders, in Britain so that they don't necessarily create this juror contamination or this potential interference with justice problem. | ||
| You could tailor the order so that the press isn't allowed to talk about the actual underlying case where these defendants are on trial for grooming children, but still allow people to talk about Tommy's sentence and what happened to Tommy Robinson. | ||
| It seems profoundly unjust to essentially put somebody in jail and then ban people from criticizing that decision. | ||
| You know, what's really scary about this is that, actually I've got, I think this is a prosecutor pulled up, I'll talk about this in a second, but saying that, you know, it's justifiable to protect this other case. | ||
| But think about, Tommy is an individual with rights. | ||
| And now he's in prison. | ||
| Where he faces risks to his life because there are people who don't like him in prison, like really don't like him. | ||
| And they are saying that the rights of these people in this trial are more important than the rights of Tommy Robinson. | ||
| That we need to protect this trial more than we protect... There's two instances of people facing a criminal justice system. | ||
| And essentially, it's interesting because they are presuming that they want to protect the victims. | ||
| In which case, it's almost like they're assuming guilt on the part of those who are facing the grooming gang trial, the defendants, and Tommy, who are actually having their rights taken away by the inability to talk about what's going on around this case. | ||
| I get it, you know, that they want to protect the victims. | ||
| So let me pull up this guy I've got over here. | ||
| It's, uh, his name is Nazir Afzal. | ||
| He's a former chief prosecutor, uh, patron of 11 NGOs, National Advisor, Welsh Government. | ||
| He said. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you saw this, I'm assuming you're saying... Yeah, I saw these tweets and I thought they were interesting. | ||
| So let me, so I'll read the first one. | ||
| He says, reporting restrictions on Tommy Robinson, so I will show why actions like this can lead to alleged criminals walking free by prejudicing a jury so that there can't be a fair trial, we nearly lost the so-called Rockdale grooming case because of a far-right communication. | ||
| He then says, the lawyers applied at their, the lawyers applied at their trial that the jury had been prejudiced by far-right. | ||
| So I guess, with that in mind, two questions. | ||
| Do you think that's a fair assessment? | ||
| trial to continue, those criminals came close to being freed and victims close | ||
| to getting no justice. Jury must decide on evidence, not on your opinion. So I | ||
| guess with that in mind, two questions. Do you think that's a fair assessment? And | ||
| then after that, is there anything akin to that in the United States? So first, is | ||
| that a fair assessment? | ||
| Yeah, I don't doubt that Mr. Afzal is right about the fact that cases will get thrown out in England on the basis of, like, the contamination of the jury pool much more easily and much more... and they have to, essentially, the people who are moving for the trial to be thrown out or moving and saying that the trial is not fair will have an easier time proving that in England because England has a very That takes the idea of a truly fair uncontaminated trial more seriously than we do in the United States. | ||
| Like, they probably would have granted O.J. | ||
| Simpson's motion to essentially throw out the case because a fair trial was impossible in the 1990s, whereas we look at the fact that there's all this media information out there is just irrelevant, right? | ||
| You have a fair trial no matter what. | ||
| And we think that people can ultimately come to fair decisions and trials even if they've been exposed to information about it. | ||
| The second point is that in the United States, we deal with the problem of jury contamination differently. | ||
| We deal with it with things like jury selection. | ||
| From my brief reading of English law, and I might be wrong about this, my brief reading of English law suggests that jury contamination isn't dealt with. | ||
| They don't have a jury selection process, right? | ||
| They don't have a situation where the lawyers can remove jurors for prejudice. | ||
| where the jurors are asked questions before they take the bench about whether or not | ||
| they've heard information about the case. | ||
| My understanding is that Britain doesn't do that and instead solves the problem of juror contamination | ||
| by using, by threatening publishers and prohibiting publishers from saying anything about cases. | ||
| That's, I think that, you know, that's still not a very good, | ||
| I think we have a much better system in this respect because we allow people to talk about cases. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh yeah. | |
| I think that's a good... I think freedom of the press is really good. | ||
| I'm glad I live in a country where people aren't getting banned and thrown in jail for daring to talk and speak | ||
| about a case that's currently ongoing. | ||
| I can understand their logic. | ||
| I'm just, you know, I tweeted the other day, I'm very grateful. | ||
| Gotta love that first amendment. | ||
| You know, you can't stop people from sharing what's going on. | ||
| And it's interesting to me too because they're, you know, this guy tweeting, | ||
| this Nez Fierce has alleged criminals. | ||
| And in the US we have a presumption of innocence. | ||
| But not just that, it's a, what is it? | ||
| Blackstone's formulation is... | ||
| That was the UK, wasn't it? | ||
| Where he said it's better that ten guilty persons go free than one innocent person suffer. | ||
| So, to refer to them as alleged criminals is... I guess that's exactly how you have to do it, but it's worrisome that the idea is you need more protections for the accuser than the... as far as I'm concerned. | ||
| When two people are in a court and there's an accusation being laid and you're presenting evidence, they should be held equally in terms of evidence and presentation and standing trial and talking. | ||
| Maybe I'm wrong and the U.S. | ||
| doesn't do that, but that makes sense to me that you don't just say, this person's made an accusation so they deserve all of these protections and these people don't. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, well, there's actually constitutional protections in a whole stream of cases around what's called the Confrontation Clause, which says that criminal defendants have the right to confront their accusers. | ||
| So, you know, in various cases, especially sexual assault cases, prosecutors have tried to ask courts to allow the accuser to testify behind closed doors, to testify remotely, to testify in a prior interview. | ||
| And all those have been thrown out. | ||
| And it's found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, which says, no, the defendant must be able to confront the accuser as a mode of due process. | ||
| So that's one instance where we take the fair trial issue quite seriously. | ||
| But this is just also, it's very clearly a difference in norms. | ||
| Britain just has a lot stricter norms for what constitutes a fair trial than we do when it comes to media publicity and media attention. | ||
| they would look at our trials, the Zimmerman trial would be another example | ||
| as just being this appalling spectacle where the person was tried and convicted in the news | ||
| well before they ever had a chance at a meaningful fair trial. | ||
| Even for example, the Harvey Weinstein case, the fact that his perp walk is published all over the news | ||
| and he's convicted in a court of public opinion before he gets his trial, | ||
| I suspect the British would look upon that as a miscarriage of justice in the sense | ||
| that even Harvey Weinstein is obviously deserving of a fair trial and the American court justice system | ||
| is making no effort to ensure that jurors are uncontaminated by bias when they will sit and judge him. | ||
| Which is actually I think a fair criticism in the sense that. | ||
| You know, who's gonna go on? | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
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Alright. | |
| Hearing that, you're like, oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It would suck if you wanted the right to a fair trial, but everyone hates you to begin with because of how it sounds. | ||
| And that's happened time and time again. | ||
| But let's just talk about the future and technology for a second. | ||
| They've imposed these reporting restrictions. | ||
| You know, a dozen-plus outlets deleted their stories, and then people in the U.S. | ||
| wouldn't shut up about it. | ||
| So what's gonna stop someone who's close to the case from just sending a text message to an American, that American then publishing it on their blog or on YouTube, and then everyone in the U.K. | ||
| having access to that too? | ||
| Are they gonna tell Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, all these other platforms, they must block every post containing information about Tommy Robinson's case? | ||
| I mean, it sounds like they would almost have to try. | ||
| And this is something to note. | ||
| UK law is pretty broad on the subject of what constitutes a publication. | ||
| There's not a lot of law explicitly talking about social media and social media accounts. | ||
| But the truth of the matter is, if you're a person, a UK citizen with a significant Twitter following, and you talk about this case and violate the reporting requirements, The people who work for Tommy have already come out saying they've been warned that if they speak too much about this, they face the same penalties, could actually be arrested for talking about it. | ||
| And that was my question, I said, so I'm not in direct communication with those, they're not telling me secrets or anything, I'm not talking to them, I'm just seeing what they're tweeting. | ||
| But I thought, well, what if I just sent a text message, like, what happened? | ||
| No one's gonna know they told me, you know what I mean? | ||
| And then I can come out and be like, here's everything that's happening. | ||
| So what's the point? | ||
| It just seems like what the UK is trying to do cannot be stopped. | ||
| You can't stop this from being talked about. | ||
| Sure, Breitbart London, right, took down their article and everyone was like, whoa, that was one of the first articles to come down. | ||
| But what about Breitbart US? | ||
| What about me on Twitter? | ||
| I can just post a screen grab of the original article and everyone can read it. | ||
| Or the archives of it. | ||
| Are they going to order archive.is to take down all the archives of the story too? | ||
| It's impossible to stop. | ||
| Somebody has proposed what's called a futility test, which is the idea that If speech restrictions don't work, then they can't possibly be justifiable. | ||
| It's pointless! | ||
| It's pointless, and so it's not just to throw people in jail if you're not even accomplishing the end you're trying to set out to accomplish. | ||
| You know what, man? | ||
| All they've accomplished so far is that we're talking about it. | ||
| Everyone is talking about it, and now more people than ever are going to know. | ||
| If they just arrested Tommy, when I first heard that he got arrested, I was like, oh man, again? | ||
| And I heard some people saying like, oh yeah, Tommy got arrested, and there wasn't that big of a conversation until the judge said, okay, now no one can talk about it. | ||
| Well, what do you think someone's gonna do? | ||
| You tell them not to do it. | ||
| Everyone wants to start talking about it now. | ||
| No, I mean, the thread I did yesterday has done well over a million impressions at this point and has been shared extremely widely, more widely than any other thing I've done on Twitter or really any work I've done, period. | ||
| And the fact is, there's other aspects of this, too. | ||
| For example, I made mistakes, errors of fact and law in that thread. | ||
| I'm trying to correct them as we speak. | ||
| But I'm not a professional journalist. | ||
| I'm just a lawyer noticing that nobody has a good explanation for what's happening. | ||
| And so I'm trying to read about British law and figure out what's happening and trying to understand it and explain it to my Twitter following. | ||
| I'm going to make mistakes. | ||
| And you might say, well, it's really irresponsible of you to do that, Will. | ||
| But that's what professional media outlets are for. | ||
| When you ban professional media outlets from reporting on the case. | ||
| and it's a case that people are gonna talk about, you get a ton of misinformation. | ||
| So I'm not intentionally trying to put out misinformation. | ||
| I'm trying to be as accurate as possible. | ||
| But I've gotten multiple critiques from people saying, I've gotten a couple of things wrong. | ||
| It's like, well, yeah, that's why reporting requirements are bad | ||
| or reporting restrictions are bad. | ||
| So that, you know, top outlets should be covering this and explaining what the hell happened. | ||
| I've been going on a rage rant bender for the past week about the media, | ||
| but I will absolutely concede to the fact that the media is more likely to get the facts straight. | ||
| And I don't mean they're gonna get it 100% right. | ||
| Like if your thread was 75% correct, they might get 80% correct. | ||
| So they're gonna make mistakes. | ||
| They're right for criticism. | ||
| But yeah, when the judge says, okay, professional journalists, no talking about it, | ||
| well then who's gonna stop the people from just talking to each other? | ||
| You know, is the UK going to tell someone with 500 Twitter followers you're not allowed to talk about Tommy Robinson? | ||
| At what point do they consider you a publisher or a journalist or high-profile personality? | ||
| Right, like, here's another question. | ||
| Okay, you only have 500 Twitter followers, but what if some of them are really prominent people with big Twitter followings who occasionally retweet you? | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| Did you know in advance that your tweet thread would explode into this thing, and now are you criminally liable in the United Kingdom for violating the court's gag order? | ||
| There was a story I covered about two weeks ago about how they actually said They would look at how many followers you had to determine whether or not you were- it was for hate speech, primarily. | ||
| But then, you know, my question is, let's say you have zero followers, and you just opened your Twitter account, and you have no image, and you're all like, wow, can't believe this happened to Tommy Robinson, and then someone searches, finds this, retweets it, boom, a million retweets in an hour, are you in trouble? | ||
| You had no followers, you had no expectation anyone would see it, are they gonna say, too bad, you used a publisher, you're at fault? | ||
| Yeah, they'd probably Incorporate my guess is in that circumstance. | ||
| They'd incorporate an intent standard that says like Clearly you didn't intend for this to go viral because you have no followers and no expectations. | ||
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unidentified
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No, no, no. | |
| Count Dankula had no followers. | ||
| I mean, I've been told by numerous parties and sources that he had about seven followers when, you know, Count Dankula's the guy who made the pug video, the Nazi pug video. | ||
|
unidentified
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True. | |
| And they said it didn't matter. | ||
| But the standards for gross offense might be distinct from the standards for publication in the context of these gag orders, right? | ||
| That's true, yeah. | ||
| Because these, you know, these gag orders are dealing with the question of who's really media, you know, who's media, who's attempting to publish this to a wide audience and who isn't. | ||
| Um, and that intent standard actually matters in this context because it's a question of are you, you know, are you actually trying to pervert the administration of justice? | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| You know, and, and so I think probably intent, although again, it's so crazy, right? | ||
| Think about it. | ||
| Like what, just to get back to another central point, what administration of justice is being perverted by talking about Tommy's sentence, by talking about Tommy's incarceration in and of itself. | ||
| Well, they're taking away his rights. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They're, you know, and I mean, Especially the fact that he's in jail. | ||
| He's at serious risk, given that the UK prison already had somebody who is a critic of Islam be assassinated in their prison system. | ||
| And they're banning discussion of it? | ||
| It's appalling. | ||
| I mean, Churchill would be incredibly disappointed. | ||
| As an understatement about what's happened to Wisconsin. | ||
| He sued plenty of people for libel, so that's still saying a lot. | ||
| I guess we've gone for a little while, but do you have one last thought or anything you want to mention about this before we wrap up? | ||
| Not really, off the top of my head. | ||
| Yeah, I think we kind of riffed on it a little bit, and I thought it was interesting to bring you in, because you are a lawyer in the U.S., so you probably have some kind of, like, law in the U.K. | ||
| is obviously different, but I think your perspective was, you know, interesting. | ||
| So, I guess the other thing is, for everybody watching, we're going to have Will on the podcast tomorrow to talk about Donald Trump and Twitter and what's going on with He's not allowed to block people. | ||
| It's a public forum. | ||
| That's going to be something entirely different, so stay tuned. | ||
| That'll be tomorrow at 4pm. | ||
| You can follow me on Twitter at TimCast. | ||
| Make sure you subscribe for new videos every single day. | ||
| And Will, do you have a social media you want to mention? | ||
| Yeah, I'm on Twitter and Periscope at Will Chamberlain on both. | ||
| Like Wilt, but second L instead of a T. Alright. |