Issue 352  29th June 2024

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has pleaded guilty in a US court under a deal allowing him to walk free following a 14-year legal battle. He entered the formal plea to a single charge in the Northern Mariana Islands, an American territory in the Pacific, two days after leaving a British prison. In return, he was sentenced to time already served and released to fly to his native Australia and be reunited with his family. US officials were pursuing the 52-year-old over a huge disclosure of secret files in 2010, which they said put lives in danger...

Assange spent the last five years behind bars at London's high-security Belmarsh Prison, fighting US attempts to extradite him. In 2010, he faced separate charges of rape and sexual assault in Sweden, which he denied. He spent seven years hiding in Ecuador's London embassy, claiming the Swedish case would lead him to be sent to the US. Swedish authorities dropped that case in 2019 and said that too much time had passed since the original complaint, but UK authorities later took him into custody. He was tried for not surrendering to the courts to be extradited to Sweden. In the US, Assange was charged with conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information, following the massive Wikileaks disclosure in 2010... In exchange for pleading guilty to the single charge under the Espionage Act, Assange received credit for time spent incarcerated in the UK, meaning he will not be held in US custody...

Jails could run out of space within “days”, putting the public in danger, prison governors warned. The Prison Governors’ Association (PGA), which represents more than 95% of all prison governors and managers working in England and Wales, said the entire criminal justice system “stands on the precipice of failure” as it called on the next government to tackle problems “without delay”. In an open letter to the leaders of political parties, the body said: “Our members are the experts in running prisons, their voice and our message, if ignored, will be at your peril.” The association believes there is “no other option open” to government than to release more prisoners early to grip the “crisis”, adding: “An uncrowded prison system should have no more than about 78,000 people in custody.” As of Friday, the prison population stood at 87,395 with a “usable operational capacity” of 88,778, indicating almost 1,500 spaces are available...

The number of people facing murder and manslaughter charges despite not being the principal offender has risen significantly, amid official warnings about the use of joint enterprise laws. Nearly 1,000 people have been charged and more than 600 convicted in the past five years in England and Wales even though they may not have been physically responsible or present at the crime scene.

The convictions involved a controversial, centuries-old legal doctrine called joint enterprise, which allows for people to be found guilty of a crime even if they did not take an active role. It had led to people who did not even see the crime take place being given life sentences for murder. In 2016 a supreme court ruling warned that the use of joint enterprise had “taken a wrong turn” and it had been incorrectly applied for over 30 years. The ruling led many to hope that the police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) would change the way it pulled multiple people into the same criminal charges. However, data obtained by the Guardian shows that rather than decreasing, the numbers have risen higher than at any time in the past 10 years...

A woman who killed two eight-year-old girls when her car crashed into a school in south-west London will not face criminal charges, the Crown Prosecution (CPS) has said. Nuria Sajjad and Selena Lau died after a Land Rover crashed into an end-of-term tea party at The Study Preparatory School in Wimbledon on 6 July 2023. The families have been informed by the CPS the woman who was driving will not be charged as she had suffered an epileptic seizure... The CPS said Ms Freemantle had an epileptic seizure behind the wheel, which caused her to lose control of the vehicle which then drove into the school. Several other people were also injured in the crash. The CPS said there was no evidence Ms Freemantle had ever suffered a similar seizure before and she had no previously diagnosed medical condition...