A jury at Woolwich Crown Court has returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty in the trial of Alfie Meadows and Zak King, two students who protested against the introduction of higher tuition fees on 9 December 2010.
Meadows and King were both facing charges of violent disorder, for which the maximum penalty is a lengthy prison sentence. This was the third time they have faced these charges, as the first trial resulted in a hung jury and the second had to be abandoned
Meadows made headline news in the days after the protest, because he received a serious brain injury after allegedly being struck with a baton.
More details to follow.
UPDATE: Alfie Meadows’s mother, Susan Matthews, says:
The struggle for justice for my son has finally begun. The whole family has been through two years of total agony. We have been silenced on what happened to our son. We can now move on to the really important thing, which is to get justice for Alfie.
A press release from Defend the Right to Protest, the campaign group that has supported King and Meadows throughout their trial, states:
Zak and Alfie have had to wait more than two years and go through the ordeal of three trials to clear their names. Meanwhile the trial has taken a heavy toll on both Alfie and Zak’s families, with Zak having had to watch his younger brother being dragged through the courts on the same false charge.
The trial has also exposed the same pattern of criminalisation and victimisation by the police and CPS, which we also saw played out in the cases of the Hillsborough tragedy and the miners’ strike at Orgreave.
Alfie suffered a baton blow to the head at the same protest, which required life-saving brain surgery. While the police have so far escaped any form of accountbility for their actions, Alfie was charged with violent disorder and has had to fight to clear his name before finally beginning the road to justice.
Of the 15 protesters who pleaded not guilty to charges of violent disorder relating to the 9 December 2010 demo, so far 14 have been found not guilty. In a time of unprecedented cuts to public funding, it is atrocious that the police and the CPS have wasted resources in the pursuit of criminalising protesters.
The trial has allowed us to scrutinise what happened on the day of the protest. The peaceful and kettled protesters were charged at with horses and subjected to indiscriminate baton use. When Alfie’s barrister Carol Hawley challenged officer Wood, a senior officer in charge of the ground operation on the day, on whether their batons had been used as a last resort, his reply was that the use of a machine gun against protesters would have been the last resort. It transpired that police also considered the use of rubber bullets against the student protesters.
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