On 1 July four black teenagers from Moston in Greater Manchester received sentences of eight years in prison for conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm purely for having been in a Telegram group chat. It is a sentence that exposed the racist, anti-working-class foundations of the British court system. The prosecution successfully argued that the boys had been part of a conspiracy that was executed over the course of three months, and which led to two attacks that were committed by other defendants. It was alleged that the boys identified targets and gathered information about their locations.
The prosecution based its case on one strand of evidence – a Telegram group chat the boys had all been part of called ‘MDs World [crying emoji]’, which was set up after one of their friends was murdered. The prosecution used informal messages exchanged by the teenagers to create a gang narrative that painted the boys as implicitly involved in a conspiracy which the judge decided ‘was played out in social media and through drill rap music, with threats of violence, the display of weapons, including firearms, machetes, and crossbows. Entering the territory of one gang was treated as provocation, to be met by violence or the threat of violence.’
However, when the facts of the case are examined properly and without the creation of a false narrative it is clear that there was no evidence or legal basis for convicting the four boys: Ademola Adedeji, Raymond Savi, Omolade Okoya and Azim Okunola. None of them had played a role in any of the violent acts described in the case; none of them possessed weapons, nor had they taken part in any activity to gather information about the location of potential targets. All they had done was participate in an informal group chat with their classmates and, like many teenagers, had discussed their interest in drill music. As the director of the campaign Kids of Colour, Roxy Legane, outlined: ‘A few boys were caught on CCTV for their offences, and they [Greater Manchester Police] used that to bring in a much wider net of young boys who were just speaking out their grief in a Telegram chat after they lost a friend.’
Kids of Colour also created a pre-sentencing survey with over 500 people from the boys’ communities, which collectively demanded either leniency for the boys or suspended sentences. Although the report did not change the outcome of the case, it was introduced by the defence team to counter the prosecution’s argument that the public would support harsh sentences. It exemplified that the narrative created during the case by the prosecution does not reflect the views of the working class.
However, relying on the racism entrenched within the legal system, the prosecution was able to turn thoughtless messages between pupils into criminal intent; the teenagers were punished for just knowing other members of their community. It allowed the judge to conclude that: ‘The defendants were not in a joint enterprise; they were each principal parties playing a full role in committing the offence of a criminal conspiracy either to kill others or to intentionally cause them grievous bodily harm.’
Unsurprisingly, the sentence provoked a community campaign in Manchester. Kids of Colour and Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association (JENGbA) organised a protest attended by 250 people in the city centre, saying ‘we are sick and tired of our children being taken from us by a racist and classist injustice system purposefully built to oppress us.’ This case reflects how a legal system built on imperialism and created to uphold the ruling class will always be used as a tool to oppress working class communities, particularly black and brown communities.
Yara Osman
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 289 August/September 2022
