Research suggests people of colour, particularly young Black men, are disproportionately targeted by Joint Enterprise, but neither the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) nor the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) recorded this data before campaign group Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association (JENGbA) took legal action against the CPS and MOJ. JENGbA campaigner JAN CUNLIFFE reports.
JENGbA is a grassroots campaign supporting over 1,500 prisoners convicted using the controversial legal doctrine of Joint Enterprise. Men, women and children as young as 12 years old serving life sentences for murder, with many not even being at the scene of a crime, let alone delivering the fatal blow.
Since 2010 JENGbA has embarked on pioneering work that has led to parliamentary inquiries, a Supreme Court victory and crucial academic research. Our Joint Enterprise Private Members Bill passed its first reading in 2022, and we predict filibustering will be out in force for its second reading.
This successful litigation against the CPS is a huge breakthrough. Who prosecutes the prosecutors? Well, the answer is JENGbA, with the help and support of Liberty. Pretty remarkable for a grassroots campaign founded by volunteers. Volunteers trying to cope with a devastating sentence handed to a loved one for a crime they did not commit.
Our victory follows the recent release of a major study by the University of Leeds in which 195,000 cases at the CPS between 2018 and 2021 were examined, revealing significant disparities in charging decisions. Now that the CPS has been force to agree to monitor who Joint Enterprise targets we will have solid data on age, gender, ethnicity and disability.
Joint Enterprise was also under scrutiny with a United Nations working group of experts recommending that the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights conduct a human rights audit of all prisons in England and Wales to identify and reconsider all Joint Enterprise convictions.
It is vital that the public begins to recognise that in a Joint Enterprise murder trial the evidential bar is set at an all-time low. Joint Enterprise is a tool for lazy lawyers wanting easy convictions. In many cases all a prosecutor needs is a flimsy ‘gang’ narrative, instead of real evidence of intent.
We have spent over a decade highlighting the injustice, as well as the racism that comes with a Joint Enterprise conviction. In 2016 we were vindicated by the Supreme Court when it was acknowledged the law had been misinterpreted for over three decades. We will be vindicated once again when the CPS finally releases its data.
Life isn’t easy for those we support; we listen to mums crying down the telephone, pleading for news of a breakthrough. The desperation in the voices of prisoners as they speak of wanting to go home can often be unbearable; it’s sometimes a challenge to just answer the telephone. Yet the strength and the courage of all those we support is what spurs us on, the bravery of these wrongly-convicted people goes beyond any words. How the judiciary or any parliamentarian for that matter, can just sit back and write these people off as collateral damage is beyond shameful.
Put yourself in their shoes: imagine being given a prison sentence for more years than you have been alive. Knowing you are innocent, knowing the judge, the jury and even the prosecutor knows you did not murder anyone. It is horrifying. And the reason why the CPS and MOJ did not collect data, is because if they had, we would all have known exactly who they target and why.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 293 April/May 2023
