There were other Lucy Connollys

The Northampton mother wasn’t the only social media user subjected to selective tough justice after the Southport massacre

Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash

It is a good thing that the conviction and incarceration of Lucy Connolly – sentenced to 31 months for remarks posted on social media in the wake of the Southport massacre – has sparked such an intense public debate. At a time when police, prosecutors and judges have become deeply politicised and are presiding over a criminal justice system in which public confidence has all but eroded, their decisions should, more than ever, be subjected to proper scrutiny.

I think I can lay claim to having been one of the first public commentators to call for Connolly to be freed. I did so on 22 October last year, just five days after the wife and mother from Northampton was sent down (and long before the case became a cause célèbre).

I have always believed that Connolly’s words were vile and worthy of the strongest condemnation. But in a truly free society, speech – even repugnant and hateful speech – must be protected in all circumstances other than where it is intended and likely to cause imminent lawless action. That standard, which is applied in the United States, seems to me to strike the correct balance between protecting our ancient right to freedom of expression and militating against violence and disorder.

But while the continued focus on Connolly’s treatment is to be welcomed, there is a danger that it serves to obscure other cases in which defendants were controversially imprisoned after making offensive comments on social media in the hours and days after the Southport attacks.

One such was that of Lee Dunn, then 51 and from Cumbria. Dunn, a worker at the Sellafield nuclear site, was found guilty last August of having posted messages on Facebook that were ‘grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character’.

There were three messages in total. The first contained an image of a group of Asian men and was accompanied by the caption ‘Coming to a town near you?’ The second showed a similar group arriving on a beach in a boat. The caption read, ‘When it’s on your turf, then what?’ And the third depicted another group of Asian men, this time armed with knives, outside the Houses of Parliament. Again, the caption read, ‘Coming to a town near you?’

Unpleasant? Certainly. Offensive? To many, undoubtedly. But did posting the messages – which, take note, were not accompanied by any call to violence or lawbreaking – merit eight weeks at His Majesty’s pleasure (Dunn’s sentence)?

In my view, no. It seems obvious that the messages were designed to convey, albeit it in rather blunt and uncouth terms, a particular narrative over the fraught topics of immigration and terrorism. We have lost control of our borders. Immigration levels have been too high for a long time. We don’t know the backgrounds or beliefs of thousands of young men pouring into our country. Many have come from troubled and violent nations in which fundamentalist religious and cultural beliefs thrive. Britain has already experienced a string of terrorist attacks perpetrated by migrant (or migrant-descended) radicals – including 7/7, Manchester arena, Liverpool women’s hospital, Reading, London Bridge, and the murder of David Amess – and the failure to get to grips with the situation may lead to more.

Of themselves, these are entirely legitimate viewpoints. That on this occasion they were couched in language and imagery that was insensitive and boorish does not alter that fact.

Nobody was being asked to approve of Dunn’s posts – in fact, many exercised their right to express their opposition to them – but they were clearly not of such a nature that merited a criminal conviction, let alone two months in prison.

Billy Thompson, then 31 and also from Cumbria, was sent to prison for 12 weeks after he went on to Facebook after the events in Southport and posted emojis depicting an ethnic minority person and a gun. While Rhys McDonald, then 34 and from Runcorn, posted a message, also on Facebook, suggesting a march on a migrant hotel ‘with torches and pitchforks’. McDonald’s words were contemptible but, like Lee Dunn, he did not call for violence or lawbreaking, and his reference to torches and pitchforks was almost certainly metaphorical. But even if he did mean it literally, I’m not aware that marching in protest with a torch and pitchfork constitutes, of itself, a crime in Britain. In which case it seems hard to justify the 28-month jail sentence he subsequently received for the post.

Julie Sweeney, then 53 and from Cheshire, was sent to prison after she posted, ‘Don’t protect the mosques. Blow the mosque up with the adults in it.’ Again, a reprehensible thing to write. But the likelihood that anyone would act on Sweeney’s words – which were later deleted – seemed slim in the extreme. That Sweeney had never previously been in trouble with the police and was the primary carer for her sick husband appeared not to bother the judge, who sentenced her to 15 months.

The incarceration of Dunn, Thompson, McDonald and Sweeney, like that of Lucy Connolly, amounted to serious overreach by the criminal justice system. It was also an example of selective tough justice. We all read and hear stories of how defendants who have committed very serious crimes – often involving physical violence or sexual assault – walk free from court, perhaps after being issued with a suspended sentence or community order. In that context, it is little wonder that suggestions of a ‘two-tier’ justice system are beginning to take hold. (The judge who jailed both Thompson and Dunn had, in 2022, impose a mere two-year community order on a defendant who had been found in possession of 46 indecent images of children – some of them in the most serious category.)

That, again like Connolly, the defendants in the aforementioned cases pleaded guilty ought not to have a bearing on the merits of the decision to haul them into court or send them to prison. Some would have been like rabbits in the headlights and easily persuaded by the advice given to them by their lawyer (indeed, it would have been interesting to see the outcome if they had each pleaded not guilty and gone before a jury).

So in all the ongoing frenzy around Connolly’s conviction and sentencing, we should not forget every other example where an individual was jailed for wrong-speak. I stress again that an argument against the harshness of the treatment meted out should not be seen as a defence of the actions of those convicted. It is possible to loathe what is being said or written while defending the right of the individual to say or write it.

In these things, we should perhaps take as our guide the former US supreme court judge Felix Frankfurter, who said, ‘Safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not-very-nice people.’

That is a truth that many among our own political class and in our criminal justice system appear not to understand or recognise.

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