Lucy Connolly and Ricky Jones: the System Worked as Intended

It’s perplexing. The Lucy Connolly and Ricky Jones cases were seemingly very similar. Mrs Connolly tweeted that she couldn’t care less if migrant hotels were burnt down, while Mr Jones told a crowd of demonstrators that far-Right Nazi scum needed their throats cutting.

So why did Lucy Connolly spend more than a year in prison while Ricky Jones faced no punishment? I’m not suggesting that two-tier justice hasn’t played a role, but there’s more to it than that. Most criticism that I’ve read has largely focused on the disparity of outcome to prove ‘two-tier’ justice. However, it was at the ‘inputs’ stage where the hefty ‘Establishment’ thumb bore down on the scales of justice to tip the outcome in Jones’s favour.

Firstly, and something that’s largely been unreported, is that they were charged with two different offences. Lucy was prosecuted under Section 19 (1) of The Public Order Act 1986.

Ricky Jones was prosecuted under Section 45 of Serious Crime Act 2007.

The offences are very different, additionally the pleas were different. Lucy pleaded guilty, Ricky not guilty.

The judge in Lucy’s case wasn’t asked to pronounce on her guilt, merely to determine her sentence, which, given the guidelines within which he worked, as the subsequent Appeal Court judgement found, wasn’t extraordinary.

In Jones’s case, to be found guilty, the jury would have had to believe that he intended someone in his audience to go and slit someone’s throat and that this was likely to happen; that it wasn’t a rhetorical flourish but an effective and likely encouragement. No one had their throat slit, no one at or around the protest appeared to be in imminent danger of having their throats slit. The jury wasn’t persuaded that he had done what he was charged with doing. Case dismissed.

Regardless of how you feel about the equivalence of the two cases, ask yourself whether, beyond reasonable doubt, you believe that Ricky Jones expected someone to act on his suggestion.

In Lucy’s case no one had to do anything. She pleaded guilty to merely intending to stir up racial hatred, which was enough for her to be sentenced to more than two-and-a-half years.

If Jones had tweeted his comments rather than saying them, and if his targets had had a protected characteristic (far-Right nazi scum don’t, but immigrants are categorised as a ‘race’ in British law), then he may have been charged on the same basis as Lucy. In which case there would have been far greater equivalence between the cases. But he didn’t, and there wasn’t.

In neither case do I lay blame at the door of the judge in the Connolly case, or the jury in the Jones case. However, there are others who do carry responsibility for the growing disenchantment of the public with the justice system. In these two cases we should be looking at the role of the police, the CPS and the judges who presided over Mrs Connolly’s remand hearing, because it was the authorites’ refusal of bail that set the ball rolling and resulted in the public losing just a little more faith in the impartiality of the system.

Could the CPS have charged Jones with a different offence? Had he been charged with the same offence as Lucy, the jury could have convicted him if they believed his words were intended to stir up racial hatred, regardless of whether they were likely to or in fact did.

This leaves us with Judge Rahim Allen-Khimani, who initially remanded Connolly, and Judge Rebecca Crane, who remanded Connolly at a later hearing.

Judge Allen-Khimani’s decision was made as Starmer’s threats to rioters and those believed to be encouraging rioters were still echoing around. General threats from prime ministers are not one of the tests that judges are required to take into account when considering an application for bail. However, it seems, with feelings running high and rioters still on the streets, the judge appears to have fallen in line with Starmer’s hard line and refused bail.

However, Judge Rebecca Crane’s refusal to grant bail at Connolly’s remand hearing at Northampton Crown Court on August 22nd 2024, almost a month after the Southport murders and almost three weeks after the subsequent riots had died down, was highly questionable.

Ricky Jones’s non-offence occurred on August 7th 2024, two weeks before Connolly’s remand hearing. Connolly was refused bail, Jones was granted it. They were both charged with serious offences carrying a maximum sentence of seven years. Why the discrepancy in the granting of bail?

In looking at Judge Crane’s decision to refuse bail, she will have rightly considered a number of factors such as the risk of Lucy absconding, the risk of her committing further offences, interference with evidence or witnesses, the nature and seriousness of the offence, the defendant’s character and the risk to public safety.

Given Connolly’s personal circumstances – she has a 13 year-old daughter and a chronically ill husband – she was an unlikely flight risk. The absence of any prior convictions and her apparent remorse in taking down the tweet within four hours of posting it, suggests she didn’t present a threat to the public. There were no witnesses she could intimidate and no evidence that she could interfere with. All this, coupled with the fact that the riots had petered out a couple of weeks previously. Seen in this light, the decision to remand Connolly looked cruel then and more so now.

In Judge Crane’s decision we can see, regardless of the outcome of any subsequent trial, that it was the process that was punishment. For the ‘Establishment’, it was a case of ‘heads we win, tails you lose’. This was two-tier justice; Connolly was going to jail regardless of any subsequent court case. Connolly was a warning to others, not a judgement on its merits.

Once remanded in custody, aware of the backlog of trials and the possibility of months on remand, it’s understandable that Connolly chose to plead guilty.

It seems unquestionable that the actions of Connolly and Jones were similar, but the outcomes have been very different.

The point of difference between the two cases essentially revolved around race. In the case of Connolly, it was determined that her target had been a group or groups with protected characteristics; consequently, she was charged with stirring up racial hatred. In the case of Jones, the group he was agitating against was not classified as a race.

In Connolly’s case, no violence needed to be incited; she only pleaded guilty to intending to stir up racial hatred. Whereas in the Jones case, he could have intended to stir up any amount of hatred; if he didn’t believe that violence would follow, then, as the jury found, he was innocent.

It’s less two-tier justice than two-tier laws. As Dominic Cummings would say, “The system worked as intended.”