Frisco police acknowledged the traffic stop was caused by an officer misreading the car’s license plate. As the officer saw it leaving a hotel in the city north of Dallas, she checked its Arkansas plate as “AZ” for Arizona — but should have run it as “AR.”

The driver of the car, her husband and one of the two children being driven by the Arkansas couple to a youth basketball tournament can all be heard sobbing on body camera video posted online by police in Frisco, Texas, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

“We made a mistake,” Frisco Police Chief David Shilson said in a statement. “Our department will not hide from its mistakes. Instead, we will learn from them.”

The video shows an officer pointing his handgun toward the Dodge Charger as he orders the driver to get out and walk backward toward officers with her hands raised. Also in the car were the woman’s husband, their son and a nephew.

Police order one of the children to step out and lift his shirt. The driver’s husband and the other child are told to stay inside and raise their hands through the open windows.

“I’ve never been in trouble a day of my life,” the pleading driver says on the video. “This is scaring the hell out of me.”

The officer who initiated the traffic stop told the driver she was pulled over because her license plate was “associated essentially with no vehicle.”

“Normally, when we see things like this, it makes us believe the vehicle was stolen,” the officer tells the crying woman on the body-camera video.

Frisco police said in their statement Friday that all the department’s officers have received guidance stressing the need for accuracy when reporting information. The department said its review will aim to “identify further changes to training, policies and procedures” to prevent future mistakes.

A Frisco police spokesman, officer Joshua Lovell, said the department had no further comment Tuesday, citing the ongoing police review of the traffic stop. He declined to provide a copy of the police incident report to The Associated Press, saying a formal records request would have to be filed for the public information.

On the body-camera video released from the July 23 traffic stop, tensions are heightened briefly when the driver tells police she has a gun locked in her car’s glove compartment.

“Occupants of the car, leave your hands outside the car. We know there is a gun in there,” one of the officers holding a handgun shouts at the passengers. “If you reach in that car, you may get shot.”

Civil rights lawyer David Henderson reviewed a video that showed part of the stop and told the Dallas Morning News he thinks the family was profiled, adding that he believes police violated the family’s constitutional rights.

A Black woman having a firearm in her vehicle also may have played a role, he said.

“In cases I’ve seen involving people of color who have a license to carry, as soon as they alert the police to the fact that they have a weapon, the police change drastically in terms of how they deal with them,” Henderson said.

More than seven minutes pass before officers on the scene holster their weapons after recognizing their mistake and approach the car.

One of the children keeps his hands on the back of the car as the driver’s husband gets out, telling the officers they’re travelers from Arkansas and had just finished breakfast before their car was stopped.

“Listen, bro, we’re just here for a basketball tournament,” the sobbing man tells the officers. One of the children can also be heard crying as the man adds: “Y’all pulled a gun on my son for no reason.”

The officers apologize repeatedly, with one saying they responded with guns drawn because it’s “the normal way we pull people out of a stolen car.” Another assures the family that they were in no danger because they followed the officers’ orders.

“Y’all cooperate, nothing’s going to happen,” the officer says. “No one just randomly shoots somebody for no reason, right?”

The officer who initiated the traffic stop and was among those with guns drawn was also Black. She explains that when she checked the license plate, “I ran it as AZ for Arizona instead of AR” for Arkansas.

“This is all my fault, OK,” the officer says. “I apologize for this. I know it’s very traumatic for you, your nephew and your son. Like I said, it’s on me.”

The driver’s husband is visibly shaken after police explain what happened.

He says that he dropped his phone after the car was pulled over. “If I would have went to reach for my phone, we could’ve all got killed.”

The man then turns away from the officers, walks to the passenger side of the car and bows his head, sobbing loudly.

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“Innocent until proven guilty” is a far more complicated concept than we often realize. Whether a defendant is judged to be guilty or innocent depends on a much wider range of factors than simply the facts of the case. And one of those factors is the quality of the defendant’s attorney. After all, it’s by no means a guarantee that an innocent person will be exonerated if they don’t have the skillful defense needed to win their case.

In the overwhelming majority of serious felony cases, the right to counsel, guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment, is frequently a dead letter. Most defendants are poor and therefore have no choice but to accept the counsel assigned to them, the majority of whom are overworked, underpaid, understaffed, hurried and forced to rely on evidence discovered, controlled and already contextualized into the prosecutor’s theory of the crime. The problem is especially acute in death penalty cases, where the stakes are higher and the procedural rules more complex. These higher hurdles shrink the pool of qualified lawyers.

But while the Supreme Court in the 20th century recognized all defendants’ need for strong representation, it’s unfortunately backtracked in the 21st century. That’s a marked step in the wrong direction if we care about the fairness of our criminal justice system.

Two Good Precedents

Two landmark 20th-century Supreme Court cases, Powell v. Alabama (1932) and Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), dramatically changed our criminal justice system for the better. Both cases involved factually innocent felony defendants who were nonetheless convicted because they couldn’t afford competent attorneys. By reversing their convictions and ruling that the Constitution guaranteed them better representation, the Supreme Court paved the way toward fairer trials and fewer miscarriages of justice.

It’s hard to imagine defendants in greater need of a good lawyer than Ozie Powell and his co-defendants—poor teenage Black kids who were charged with gang raping two white women in rural Alabama in 1931. Lynch mobs formed during their arrest and their visits to the courthouse, posing a constant threat to the proceedings. The National Guard was even called in to protect the accused as they awaited trial.

The judge understood that in the Jim Crow South, convictions in cases like this one were a foregone conclusion, so he sought to expedite the process. He appointed a 69-year-old named Milo Moody, long out of practice, to represent the defendants, with an out-of-state real estate lawyer, Stephen Roddy, who arrived at trial drunk and was unfamiliar with Alabama procedure, to assist him. The judge put Moody and Roddy under impossible constraints: They were given virtually no time to meet with their clients, let alone prepare their defenses. The nine defendants were divided into groups, and three trials were held—the first of which commenced just 12 days after their arrests. Ozie Powell’s sham trial started and finished the same day. Along with seven of the other defendants, he was sent to the electric chair (only Roy Wright, just 12 years old when arrested, was spared that fate).

Powell was the first case in which the Supreme Court overturned a state criminal court conviction because the state had violated the defendant’s constitutional right to counsel. It marked the beginning of federal court supervision of state death penalty procedures by ruling, at long last and unequivocally, that in capital cases each state’s criminal justice system was subject to the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Justice George Sutherland wrote for the majority of the court that due process requires the “right to be heard” and that, to meet that requirement in capital cases, the defendant must have the “guiding hand of counsel at every step in the proceedings.” The court made it clear that one of the primary evils it was trying to prevent was wrongful convictions: “Without [counsel], though he be not guilty, he faces the danger of conviction because he does not know how to establish his innocence.”

That is precisely what happened to Ozie Powell and his co-defendants. After a lengthy series of trials, re-trials and plea bargains tainted by racism and a sensational atmosphere, all nine of the defendants—known as the “Scottsboro Boys”—were eventually pardoned. One of the alleged rape victims eventually testified that her original accusation was false and the defendants had never harmed her. The state’s medical expert, who examined the alleged victims and originally testified without cross-examination, was discredited when questioned by competent counsel during subsequent proceedings. Looking back, Powell and his co-defendants’ innocence is obvious. It was Alabama’s criminal justice system that was guilty.

Gideon v. Wainwright, decided 31 years after Powell, extended the constitutional right to counsel to all felony defendants. Clarence Earl Gideon was charged with breaking and entering a Florida pool room with the intent to commit a robbery. The state’s evidence against him was weak, yet convicting him was easy. He was poor, uneducated and had no lawyer, and, furthermore, the trial judge refused his request for representation. After doing his best to defend himself at trial against impossible odds, Gideon was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison.

Writing in pencil on lined paper from prison, Gideon urged the Supreme Court to review his case, reverse his conviction and reinterpret the Constitution so that going forward similarly situated defendants would be guaranteed a lawyer at trial. The court agreed to hear his case and assigned him a superstar attorney, future Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas. From the moment Gideon was represented by able counsel, he did nothing but win in the courtroom.

Writing for a majority of the court, Justice Hugo Black, a U.S. Senator from Alabama during the Scottsboro Boys saga, explained that trials are fundamentally unfair when defendants are deprived of legal counsel. “The right of one charged with crime to counsel may not be deemed fundamental and essential to fair trials in some countries, but it is in ours,” he wrote. The practice of criminal law is complex. Often even intelligent, educated laymen making their best effort won’t spot such things as errors in an indictment or violations of the rules of evidence. They simply stand no chance against the state, which has an almost unlimited amount of investigative and adjudicatory expertise and resources at its disposal. To perform their truth-seeking function, trials require roughly comparable adversaries capable of meaningfully testing each other’s evidence. In this case, Florida had the collective skill and knowledge of the prosecutorial bar and the entire treasury to draw from, but Gideon had only his will to remain free.

The court made clear that without a robust right to counsel, an intolerable number of innocents would be falsely condemned. It quoted Justice Sutherland’s warning about wrongful convictions in Powell and reversed Gideon’s conviction.

The Tide Starts To Turn

But with the arrival of the tough-on-crime era, starting in the 1970s, politicians exploded the blueprint for fair trials we inherited from the common law and the Framers who designed the Bill of Rights. The war on drugs, overcriminalization, zealous law enforcement and tougher sentencing laws caused America’s prison population to skyrocket from about 329,000 in 1980 to more than 1.2 million in 2021.

In 98% of federal criminal cases, the defendant, almost always on the advice of counsel, forfeits his constitutional trial rights and agrees to plead guilty. The percentage is nearly as high, 97%, when adding state and federal cases together. The tough-on-crime political objectives of the past 50 years have overrun the system with cases and turned core constitutional guarantees like the right to a speedy and public trial into “parchment rights”—beautiful ideas in theory yet all but dead in practice.

The Powell and Gideon courts never could’ve foreseen how exponentially the public’s appetite for state punishment would grow or how the role of the criminal defense attorney would change from litigator to hapless dealmaker. Criminal cases pit the state and its vast resources against the defense and its more limited resources. It usually isn’t particularly hard for most highly trained, experienced and well-funded prosecutors convinced of the defendant’s guilt to make those who are innocent appear guilty. To take advantage of their strong negotiating position during plea bargaining, prosecutors often overcharge defendants with long lists of crimes carrying interminable sentences. At this point, the defendant’s chances of exoneration are only as strong as the skill, savvy, strategic decision-making, legal knowledge and determination of his defense attorney. However, as with most consumer services, criminal defendants, the vast majority of whom are moneyless, usually get what they pay for. Their defense attorneys spend little, if any, time outside of court getting to know their clients or investigating their cases. While there are many exceptional public defenders, most generally presume their clients to be guilty and seek to dispense with their cases quickly by negotiating guilty pleas.

James Madison and the others who crafted the criminal procedure provisions in our Bill of Rights were sons of the Enlightenment and sought to implement and expand the twin Enlightenment goals of fairness and truth-seeking by ensuring that those accused of crimes were actually given trials where adversaries battled over whether the evidence prosecutors presented was strong enough to prove guilt. To the extent that Madison’s vision still exists, it’s mostly as a ghost of what should have been and, hopefully, might one day be.

The Supreme Court Goes Astray

While Powell and Gideon set positive precedents for the rights of defendants in our criminal justice system, the Supreme Court has taken a major step to betray the legacy of those cases and stall the progress of those decisions. Just last year, the court’s ruling in Shinn v. Ramirez and Jones, sent an almost certainly innocent inmate back to death row to be executed.

That inmate, Barry Jones, was charged with unspeakable crimes. The state claimed that, while babysitting his girlfriend’s four-year-old daughter, he raped the young girl, causing internal injuries that killed her over an agonizing final 12 hours. Although Jones was convicted by a jury in an Arizona state court, he subsequently used evidence discovered years later by competent new attorneys to prove to multiple federal court judges that both his trial and post-conviction lawyers were negligent, uninterested in defending him and, for those reasons, failed to discover evidence that would’ve convinced the jury of his innocence.

But the majority of the Supreme Court’s justices were unimpressed. The court ruled against him despite having been given a compelling “friend of the court” brief by the Innocence Network, a consortium of organizations dedicated to freeing wrongfully convicted inmates. The brief explained that bad lawyering is one of the leading causes of wrongful convictions and that a ruling against Jones and David Martinez Ramirez, another Arizona inmate claiming to have been appointed inept lawyers in violation of the Constitution, would make their urgent work to stand up for the wrongfully convicted much more difficult. To drive home the point, the brief contained a series of disturbing vignettes describing cases of innocent inmates who’d languished in prison for years due to their original lawyers’ incompetence and were only freed because they’d been lucky enough to eventually find both committed attorneys and judges open to hearing the evidence of their prior attorneys’ failures.

If the court read the Innocence Network’s brief at all, it was unpersuaded by it. Instead, the prosecutor’s argument that “innocence is not enough” to open the federal courthouse door to claims of ineffective lawyering, even in capital cases, won the day.

The Sixth Amendment Competency Standard

Since Powell, the court has made it clear that the Sixth Amendment right to counsel can’t be satisfied if the attorney given to a defendant is incompetent. However, the rule has existed more in theory than in practice. The court announced the current constitutional standard for competency in the 1984 case of Strickland v. Washington. To win, the court ruled in Strickland, a defendant must show that, using “prevailing professional norms,” his attorney’s performance “fell below an objective standard of reasonableness” and that, as a result, there is a “reasonable probability” the jury reached the wrong conclusion. The requirement, which focuses on the reliability of the jury’s guilty verdict, clearly evinced the same concern for wrongful convictions shown in Powell and Gideon.

Barry Jones’ trial counsel was plainly incompetent under this standard. He neither investigated the facts of Jones’ case nor pressed his legal rights. Jones was doubly wronged when the post-conviction counsel he was appointed repeated many of the same mistakes and proved himself incompetent by failing to make the obvious case that Jones had been the victim of his predecessor’s bad lawyering. As Innocence Project Executive Director Christina Swarns wrote in The New York Times, “Mr. Jones lost the lawyer lottery twice.” Having not been assigned a skilled lawyer willing to fight on his behalf at either stage of his case, Jones, his likely innocence notwithstanding, never had a chance.

As with Clarence Earl Gideon, Jones’ luck began to change when a good lawyer finally took up his case. In her book-length series of articles on the case for The Intercept, journalist Liliana Segura chronicles the years-long effort Jones’ current lawyer, Assistant Arizona Federal Public Defender Cary Sandman, undertook to unearth the evidence of innocence Jones’ previous lawyers should have found.

Death row inmates routinely seek review of their state court convictions in federal habeas corpus hearings. Jones was no exception. Federal district court judge Timothy Burgess took Jones’ claims of ineffective assistance of counsel seriously. He held a week-long hearing in which Jones presented evidence showing that, as Segura’s article puts it, his conviction had been based on “shoddy police work, junk forensics, and a flawed defense.” Jones further showed that because his lawyers failed to investigate his claims of innocence, the jury never learned of three plausible alternative suspects, including the victim’s mother, who was acquitted of the murder but sentenced to eight years in prison for child abuse in a previous trial. Jones also called expert medical witnesses who explained that the victim could not have suffered her fatal injuries during the time period in which she was alone with Jones, exploding the prosecutors’ theory of the case.

While Jones’ new lawyers hadn’t altogether proved him innocent, Judge Burgess found that Jones had shown that his previous lawyers failed to meet the Strickland standard. He ordered the state to either set Jones free or retry him within 45 days, this time with competent defense counsel. The state appealed Judge Burgess’ ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which unanimously upheld his decision, concluding that “there is a reasonable probability that the jury might have arrived at a different conclusion on the question of whether Jones had inflicted the injuries.”

However, Jones’ good fortune ended last year when the Supreme Court, focusing on procedure and ignoring substance, overturned these decisions and sent Jones back to Arizona’s death row.

During oral argument, Jones’ prosecutor, Brunn W. Roysden III, argued that Jones never should have been able to present the newly discovered evidence showing his innocence to those lower courts in the first place because the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton in 1996 to reduce federal habeas corpus review of state court convictions, had stripped those courts of the power to hear Jones’ claims. AEDPA was passed in the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombings, when the nation was impatient with violent crime generally and, more particularly, was frustrated by the prospect of bomber Timothy McVeigh enjoying an expansive access to the courts that would delay his execution. AEDPA was designed to protect and expedite executions by limiting federal court review of death penalty cases. It did so, in part, by denying federal judges the power to consider evidence never presented in state courts that a defendant’s trial was unfair. According to AEDPA, federal judges were “procedurally defaulted” from considering such evidence.

However, the Supreme Court recognized an important exception to the procedural default doctrine in Martinez v. Ryan, decided in 2012. This case, also from Arizona, involved a defendant who, like Jones, argued that AEDPA’s procedural default rule effectively denied him any opportunity to assert his Sixth Amendment right to counsel because he, too, had “lost the lawyer lottery” and both his trial and post-conviction lawyers had been incompetent. Realizing that in cases like this AEDPA might be erasing the core constitutional right established in Powell and advanced in Gideon, both of which are cited in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion, the court carved out an exception to the procedural default doctrine for cases in which inmates seek to prove that previous counsel at both stages were constitutionally deficient.

But last year, the Supreme Court ruled that Barry Jones never should’ve been allowed a “Martinez hearing.” While Powell, Gideon and other cases guarantee a right to trial counsel, the court has never recognized a constitutional right to a post-conviction attorney, even though a professional consensus has emerged, especially in light of all the exonerations of the DNA revolution, that basic fairness requires one. Justice Clarence Thomas’ majority opinion seized on this limitation of the right to counsel to limit its application even further and, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor puts it in her dissent, “gut” the court’s ruling in Martinez. “[B]ecause there is no constitutional right to counsel in state postconviction proceedings,” Thomas writes, “a prisoner ordinarily must “bea[r] responsibility for all attorney errors during those proceedings. … Among those errors, a state prisoner is responsible for counsel’s negligent failure to develop the state postconviction record.”

Barry Jones is a likely innocent man who has spent decades on death row because Arizona’s criminal justice system assigned him multiple lawyers who failed to perform basic tasks that would have freed him. By ruling that Jones should suffer the consequences of his attorneys’ negligence and essentially overruling the Martinez exception to the procedural default doctrine, the court has forsworn and backslid from the commitment it made to protect the innocent long ago in Powell and Gideon. It has all but ensured a future of even more wrongful capital convictions and, quite possibly, executions.

Indeed, in Garza v. Idaho, decided in 2019, two justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, announced that Gideon hadn’t been decided using the method of constitutional interpretation they preferred and signaled they might be willing to overturn the 60-year precedent. Worse news for the innocence movement can hardly be imagined: Such a regression would potentially throw our criminal trial system into upheaval and stuff our jails and prisons with whomever prosecutors feel like charging—guilty and innocent alike.

The best way to minimize wrongful convictions is to ensure that criminal defendants have competent, zealous advocates in the courtroom pressing their rights and challenging the prosecution’s evidence. In the courtroom, lawyers aren’t just the sword and shield of their clients—they are the tacticians wielding them. A defendant without a skillful lawyer is usually nothing more than a prisoner-in-waiting.

Hopefully, a new generation of law students—born after the DNA revolution in forensic evidence began 30 years ago and raised consuming the seemingly infinite number of news stories, podcasts and true crime documentaries on wrongful convictions—will read the court’s opinion in Shinn as a call to action. We need these future lawyers and judges to answer the alarm and help us put the court back on track to protect defendants’ right to legal representation.

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The 76-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner was detained as the military seized control of the country nearly a year ago and has been slapped with nearly a dozen charges that critics say are politically motivated.

She was sentenced to two years for the possession of unlicensed walkie-talkies, and two years for breaching coronavirus curbs, legal sources said.

Aung San Suu Kyi, who denies all charges, is on trial in a closed court and could be sentenced to a total of more than 100 years in prison if she is found guilty on all the counts against her. Her lawyers were ordered not to talk about her case last October.

She was convicted last month on “incitement” and breaching COVID-19 protocols and given a four-year prison sentence, which a few hours later was halved by coup leader Min Aung Hlaing in what was portrayed as a pardon.

In December, state television reported that a sentence would be applied at Aung San Suu Kyi’s “current detention” place. It is not clear where is being held and whether the same approach would be taken in Monday’s case.

Rights group Amnesty International said on Twitter on Monday the new convictions were “the latest act in the farcical trial against the civilian leader”.

It called for her release along with thousands of others “unjustly detained” since the coup.

“The Myanmar junta’s courtroom circus of secret proceedings on bogus charges is all about steadily piling up more convictions … so that she will remain in prison indefinitely,” Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

Cambodia visit

The conviction came after Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen visited Myanmar and met Min Aung Hlaing in a visit that was heavily criticized by people inside Myanmar, as well as by civil society groups.

Hun Sen, who this year took over from Brunei as chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), did not meet Aung San Suu Kyi and there was no mention of her in the joint statement that he released with coup leader Min Aung Hlaing following the visit on Sunday.

A previous ASEAN special envoy canceled his visit to Myanmar after the generals refused to allow him to meet her, leading the group to bar Min Aung Hlaing from attending its annual summit meeting last year.

The generals have also been under fire from ASEAN over their refusal to follow a Five Point Consensus agreed in April last year to resolve the country’s violent political crisis, but there are concerns that Hun Sen, who wields almost unfettered power in Cambodia, will take an easier line.

Aung San Suu Kyi spent years under house arrest under Myanmar’s previous military regimes.

The military-drafted constitution that laid down the conditions for the country’s democratic reforms excluded her from the presidency because she married a UK citizen and her two children are British.

Min Aung Hlaing has sought to justify his coup by claiming fraud in the November 2020 elections the returned Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party to power in a landslide. The elections commission said there was no evidence of wrongdoing in the poll.

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The misdemeanor court in the capital of Cairo fined Hossam Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, 10,000 Egyptian pounds (around $640), his group said.

In July, Bahgat was ordered to stand trial on charges he insulted Egypt’s election authority, spread false news alleging electoral fraud, and used social media to commit crimes.

His indictment was based on a 2020 tweet in which he blamed the election authority’s chairman for allegedly mishandling the parliamentary vote held that year.

The US State Department condemned Bahgat’s trial and detention at the time.

The Egyptian government has in recent years waged a wide-scale crackdown on dissent, jailing thousands of people, mainly Islamists, but also secular activists involved in the 2011 Arab Spring uprising that toppled longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

Since 2016, Bahgat has been banned from traveling abroad and has had his personal assets frozen in connection with a separate, decade-long criminal investigation. In that probe he and many other activists have been accused of receiving foreign funding.

Last week, leading international rights group Amnesty International urged Egyptian authorities to halt their “relentless persecution” of Bahgat.

“These endless legal proceedings look like a clear reprisal against Bahgat’s storied legacy of defending human rights,” the group said in a statement.

Bahgat’s conviction came less than two weeks after a state security emergency court sentenced Zyad el-Elaimy, a prominent human rights lawyer and former lawmaker, to five years in prison. He had been convicted of conspiring to commit crimes with an outlawed group, a reference to the Muslim Brotherhood, which Egypt has banned as a terrorist organization.

The same court also sentenced journalists Hossam Monis and Hisham Fouad to four years in prison on the same charges.

The post Egypt’s leading activist found guilty after critical tweet appeared first on News Agency nabakhabar.

After a four-week trial, the defendants were convicted on Thursday of organising and participating in the rally in 2019, joining two others who pleaded guilty earlier. They could face up to 10 years in prison, though their sentences are likely to be shorter than that.

The verdict was the latest blow to the flagging democracy movement as the governments in Hong Kong and Beijing tighten the screws in their efforts to exert greater control over the semi-autonomous Chinese territory.

The defendants included 82-year-old Lee, considered the father of democracy in Hong Kong, Lai – who is also facing a separate trail over alleged national security offenses – former legislators Margaret Ng and Cyd Ho Sau-lan, the lawyer Albert Ho Chun-yan, and the veteran activists Lee Cheuk-yan and “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung. Former legislators Au Nok-hin and Leung Yiu-chung had pleaded guilty earlier.

The defendants were released on bail and sentencing will be decided at a later date. The maximum penalty for each offense is five years.

Before the ruling, a small group of supporters displayed banners outside the West Kowloon court building, including one that read “oppose political persecution”. Some chanted “five demands, not one less”, a rallying cry from the protest movement which includes demands for universal suffrage – a now impossible prospect following recent changes to the electoral system by Beijing – and amnesty for the thousands of arrested protesters.

Shortly before entering court Lee Cheuk-yan, 64, told media there was a “difficult situation in Hong Kong”, and labeled their prosecution as political retaliation. “We will continue the struggle,” he said.

The conviction relates to a rally on 18 August 2019, when an estimated 1.7 million people marched peacefully, but against police orders. Its organisers, the Civil Human Rights Front, had been given permission to hold a rally in Victoria Park, but not a march, which began when crowds spilled on to the streets, taking over major roads to walk to government offices a few kilometers away. In contrast to many protests in 2019, it remained peaceful.

The defendants were arrested in April 2020 among a group of 15 people accused of organising the rally and two other protests. The arrests drew international rebuke, including a warning from the UN. Subsequent crackdowns on pro-democracy figures and changes to Hong Kong’s semi-democracy have brought further recriminations and sanctions from the international community.

The prosecution had argued the 18 August organisers “deliberately flouted the law” and were disingenuous in claiming they were not leading a march but instead enacting a “dispersal plan” because the police deliberately did not have one, according to Thursday’s judgment.

The district judge Amanda Woodcock found the march “was not a dispersal plan born out of necessity but an unauthorised public procession”, citing among other evidence, public instructions before the event by Leung for attendees to “be water” – a tactic of spontaneous and flexible demonstration adopted by the protest movement.

“This sounds more like a rallying cry rather than an explanation behind a dispersal plan and overriding concern for safety,” said Woodcock.

She said she found police evidence believable, but that “in any event” their actions, inactions, mistakes or neglect of duties were not relevant to the question of whether the defendants organised an unauthorised rally.

Beijing has cracked down even harder on dissent since 2019, imposing a national security law last year, and earlier this week amending Hong Kong’s Basic Law, or constitution, to almost halve the proportion of directly elected representatives in the city’s legislature, which already had limited powers, and to require all candidates to be vetted for political loyalty.

Lee Cheuk-yan is facing three other trials this year on separate but similar charges, for organising unauthorised assemblies including a 2020 vigil for the Tiananmen Square massacre. “I think it’s inevitable I will go to jail,” he told the Guardian in February.

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Servier Laboratories was also fined €2.7 million but cleared of its charges for fraud in a case that grew into France’s biggest modern health scandals.

The 6,500 plaintiffs had accused the company of putting profits ahead of patients’ lives by allowing its diabetes drug, Mediator, to be widely and irresponsibly prescribed as a diet pill.

The drug is suspected of causing up to 2,000 deaths among millions who took it as an appetite suppressant over three decades, according to a 2010 study. Doctors also linked it to heart and lung problems.

The company was tried for charges including manslaughter, involuntary injury, fraud, and influence trading. Investigating magistrates concluded that Servier covered up the drug’s effects on patients.

Sylvie Daunis, who presided over the ruling at a Paris court, said the company has “undermined confidence in the health system.”

“Despite the knowledge they had of the risks incurred for many years, (…) they never took the necessary measures and thus deceived” consumers of Mediator, she added.

Prosecutors had asked for the company to be fined nearly €15 million and for the only Servier executive accused of involvement still alive today, Dr. Jean-Philippe Seta, to be sentenced to three years in jail and to pay a fine of €278,000.

Seta was sentenced to a four-year suspended prison term.

France’s national medicines agency was also slapped with a €303,000 fine for colluding to mask the drug’s danger.

Plaintiffs have also asked for damages totalling €1 billion.

Servier has asked for an acquittal, arguing that it wasn’t aware of the risks associated with Mediator before 2009 and that it never pretended it was a diet pill.

One doctor flagged concerns as far back as 1998 and testified that he was bullied into retracting them. Facing questions about the drug’s side effects from medical authorities in Switzerland, Spain and Italy, Servier withdrew it from those markets between 1997 and 2004.

It took an independent investigation by another worried French doctor before the company suspended sales in its main market in France in 2009.

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Two drivers were also found guilty at the Old Bailey of conspiring to transport Vietnamese migrants from northern France to Britain. The verdicts came at the end of a trial which exposed for the first time a complex and lucrative operation which has for years illegally brought Vietnamese people into the UK.

Eamonn Harrison, 23, a lorry driver from Northern Ireland, and Gheorghe Nica, 43, the coordinator of the operation, from Romania, were found guilty of manslaughter. Another Northern Irish lorry driver, Christopher Kennedy, 24, and Valentin Calota, 38, a pickup driver from Romania, were both convicted of conspiring to smuggle people into the country unlawfully.

Police said the two ringleaders, Nica and Ronan Hughes, 41, who pleaded guilty before the trial began, were motivated by “pure and utter greed” when they decided to ignore obvious risks and packed the container with double the normal number of people to increase their profit on an operation that netted them hundreds of thousands of pounds for every “consignment” of migrants. Each passenger paid smugglers between £10,000 and £13,000 to be brought from northern France to the UK.

The court heard how young lorry drivers from a rural area of Northern Ireland were recruited to work for Hughes, an Irish haulier, who alternated between legitimate shipments of waffles, soft drinks and wine from warehouses across Europe and illegal smuggling of alcohol, cigarettes and people. He often undercut other haulage firms to secure legitimate work so he was able to appear to be running a reputable business.

The drivers claimed in court that although they were knowingly involved in smuggling illegal items, they had no idea there were people in the containers, but the jury was unconvinced.

The trial focused on four unlawful consignments of migrants brought to the UK in October 2019, the last of which ended in the deaths of the 39 people. Kennedy and Calota were not involved that night, but participated in earlier transportations along the same route.

Maurice Robinson, 26, a lorry driver who collected the trailer with the 39 migrants, who were already dead, from Purfleet docks in Essex on 22 October, also pleaded guilty to manslaughter before the trial began.

CCTV screengrab of Maurice Robinson leaving Purfleet port in Essex. 
Photograph: Essex Police/PA

The victims were 28 men, eight women and three children, two of them aged 15. When it became obvious there was insufficient oxygen they made desperate attempts to escape, and tried to call emergency services in Vietnam. As they began to die inside the dark container, where the temperature had risen to 38.5C, they recorded farewell messages for their relatives. They died of asphyxia and hyperthermia, or overheating.

All three drivers on trial offered the same defence: that they knew they were involved in criminal smuggling activity – and were using burner phones to communicate their plans – but they had no idea they were helping to smuggle people.

Harrison said he thought he was helping to smuggle stolen lorry parts; Kennedy said he believed he was involved in transporting untaxed cigarettes. Although Nica admitted involvement in people-smuggling on earlier occasions, he claimed he was unaware that people were involved on the night of 22 October.

The prosecution barrister, Bill Emlyn Jones, questioned whether it was plausible that the drivers could not have noticed people getting in and out of the back of their vehicles. He asked if they could have been “blissfully unaware of the smuggling of migrants as it took place literally under their noses”.

He said it would have been a “ridiculous and avoidable risk” for the ringleaders to recruit drivers who did not know what they were smuggling. “Just a look in the wing mirror would have been enough to give the game away.”

The court heard that most of the Vietnamese people who wanted to travel to the UK were given instructions via Facebook Messenger and the messaging app Viber to meet at a flat in Paris. They were then taken on a five-hour taxi ride to Bierne, a village near Dunkirk, where they hid in a barn until Harrison arrived to collect them.

Harrison said he was told to take a walk, or have a nap in his cab while the loading happened. He said he was watching Netflix while the 39 were locked inside the container.

The prosecution argued that this was unlikely, and called “witness X” – a Vietnamese passenger who was smuggled to London on 10 October 2019 in a truck owned by Hughes – to give evidence. He told the court that the lorry driver had loaded him and the other migrants into the trailer.

When the container arrived in the UK, another of Hughes’s drivers would collect it from the docks at Purfleet to take it to a container park in the grounds of nearby Collingwood Farm. Each time, Hughes and Nica arranged for a number of vehicles to be waiting to take the migrants to a flat in Dulwich, south London, believed to belong to a man called Fong, who was the key Vietnamese contact.

People would be locked inside the flat until relatives made the final £10,000 payment for successful delivery to the UK, at which point they were free to leave. Fong, who has not been traced, is believed to have shared the payments with Hughes and Nica.

Police said the lorry drivers who collected the migrants from northern France and delivered them to Zeebrugge, or collected them from Purfleet and took them to the waiting vehicles, were paid about £1,500 per passenger – making £30,000 for the average-sized consignment of 20 migrants.

Sometimes the migrants were loaded on top of other shipments. Kennedy spent a few hours with his boss, Hughes, trying to make a consignment of Mrs Crimble’s macaroons and bakewell tarts look presentable enough to be delivered to the wholesaler, after a group of about 20 migrants had travelled for nine hours sitting on them. The wholesaler rejected the biscuits because they were crushed and covered with footprints.

The court heard that double the usual number of migrants had been packed into the final October shipment because just a few days earlier, on 14 October, Harrison had collected 20 Vietnamese people from northern France but was stopped at the Eurotunnel entrance and all 20 were removed. Harrison was not fined, and was allowed to continue to the UK with an empty trailer. Anxious to secure the money, paid on arrival, Hughes decided to increase the number in the shipment on 22 October.

An expert witness told the court that even with just 15 or 20 passengers the amount of oxygen in the trailer would begin dwindling after about nine hours. Hughes was clearly conscious of the risks involved in doubling the number of migrants and messaged Robinson to tell him to stop and give them some air as soon as he left the port in Essex. When Robinson opened the container doors it was too late: they were all dead.

Image of phone message from Hughes to Robinson about the people in the 
back of his lorry. Photograph: Essex Police/PA

“They were treated worse than cattle,” DCI Daniel Stoten, who led the Essex police investigation, said. “They treated them as just another commodity. It could have been drugged, it could have been alcohol. Each person had a price. It was inhumane.”

Police said Robinson, who claimed he was paid £600 a week as a lorry driver, had unexplained payments totaling £100,000 going into his bank account the year before his arrest, and drove an expensive Mercedes. Had all the smuggling runs Hughes organized in October been successful, the conspirators would have earned more than £1m.

This was the biggest investigation ever conducted by Essex police, and involved more than 1,300 people. Officers analysed 1,586 witness statements and conducted 55 interviews. As a result of the deaths, a new design of refrigerated trailer has been made which includes a safety air valve that can be opened from the inside. And lorry drivers found with people in their trailers will no longer be let off with a fine but face immediate arrest.

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