German doctor on trial for allegedly murdering 15 patients in his care
Prosecutors have charged the 40-year-old defendant with '15 counts of murder with premeditated malice and other base motives', and are seeking a life sentence, which in Germany usually amounts to 15 years in prison.
They aim, however, for the Berlin state court to establish 'particularly serious guilt', which would result in the doctor being detained on a preventative basis even after that sentence is up, as well as receiving a lifetime ban on practising medicine.
As the trial opened on Monday, prosecutor Philipp Meyhoefer said the doctor had arranged the house calls with the intention of killing his patients 'without their knowledge or consent' using 'a deadly mix of various medications'.
'He acted with disregard for life … and behaved as the master of life and death,' Meyhoefer told the court. Two of the killings are believed to have taken place on the same day in 2024.
Authorities are still investigating dozens of other suspected killings possibly committed by the defendant, identified only as Johannes M. in accordance with German privacy rules. He was arrested last August.
The doctor worked for a mobile nursing service offering palliative at-home care to terminally ill patients. His alleged victims – 12 women and three men – ranged in age from 25 to 94, and died between September 2021 and July 2024.
He is believed to have given his unwitting patients an anaesthetic and a muscle relaxant, incapacitating their respiratory muscles and leading them to asphyxiate within minutes. While all were gravely ill, none had been expected to die imminently.
A suspicious co-worker called attention to the fact that at least five of Johannes M.'s patients had purportedly died in fires, leading authorities to open a criminal investigation.
The Berlin prosecutor's office said another 70 cases potentially linked to the defendant were still being examined, including the death of his mother-in-law in Poland in early 2024. She had been suffering from cancer.
The defendant declined an opportunity to address the court as his trial opened as well as a psychiatric evaluation. His alleged motive remains unclear.
The trial is scheduled to run until at least late January 2026, with about 150 people expected to be called as witnesses, news agency DPA reported. Thirteen relatives of the dead patients have joined the proceedings as co-plaintiffs.
The case recalls that of German nurse Niels Högel, who received a life sentence in 2019 for murdering 85 patients in his care with lethal injections between 2000 and 2005. Högel is often called postwar Germany's most prolific serial killer.
The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.
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BBC News
39 minutes ago
- BBC News
I've never seen a case like Constance Marten and Mark Gordon's - it was jaw-dropping
I've reported on many criminal cases, but nothing like Constance Marten and Mark Gordon's. Their trials were extraordinary.A couple who were twice in the dock over the death of their baby, they appeared to be completely in love and still fiercely united. And yet they had utter contempt for the court caused chaos across their two trials, which both overran by months. At one point, the Old Bailey's most senior judge accused them of trying to "sabotage" and "manipulate" their retrial. It nearly collapsed a number of behaviour - from refusing to turn up to court and claiming to be ill, to sacking countless barristers and Gordon's trousers even being misplaced one day - left His Honour Judge Mark Lucraft KC exasperated on many one point he said two teenagers, who had been in his court the previous week, were "rather better behaved" than Marten, adding: "And they pleaded guilty to murder."Over the last 18 months I've sat through Marten and Gordon's two criminal first, which started in January 2024, resulted in the pair being found guilty of concealing the birth of their baby, Victoria, of perverting the course of justice and child in late June, the jury in that trial was dismissed, unable to decide on one of the two, more serious charges about Victoria's death.A second trial began almost nine months later. They have now both been found guilty of manslaughter by gross their case is over, we can report some of the remarkable moments when jurors were not in court. At times what happened across the trials was jaw-dropping. 'Will you stop flirting with me' Marten and Gordon were highly unusual defendants. They would often talk during proceedings - as if completely unaware they were on trial. They knew their conversations were disruptive, but they didn't seem to day, while a witness was giving evidence, Marten sent a note to the judge asking: "Could I nip out for a coffee as we're falling asleep?"The judge said it "doesn't look good" if defendants aren't interested in the evidence. They were, of course, on trial over the death of their was obvious from the moment I first saw Marten and Gordon that they were still very much in love. They presented as a couple in court, rather than as co-defendants. "Will you stop flirting with me," Marten said loudly to Gordon one day after the judge left her 38th birthday, they had a lingering embrace in the dock. "Where's my present," she playfully appeared fixated on each other. "Obsession" was how Gordon described his love for Marten to police, saying he would have done anything for while giving evidence in their retrial, as if reading an open love letter to court, he declared "it was love" between him and his "noble" and "beautiful" wife."She was one of the best things that ever happened to me in my life." Marten and Gordon were often excited to see each other when they were brought up from the cells. Her face would light up when he appeared at the dock door. Sometimes she would blow Gordon were affectionate. They hugged and kissed on the cheek. Sometimes they tenderly stroked each other's hand. When Marten became tearful Gordon put his arm out to comfort proceedings, sitting with a dock officer between them, Gordon would often try to catch Marten's eye and smile. She would frequently lean towards him, with her chin resting on her the end of the day, before being led back to their cells, they'd sometimes say "love you" to each other. It seemed like they looked forward to coming to court, a place they got to spend time together. But there was a sense of chaos before the couple's first trial began in the early weeks of 2024. Marten and Gordon's legal representation kept changing - a running theme throughout their protracted they sacked. Others withdrew. Sometimes they didn't have lawyers at all. It caused unending trials like this, involving serious charges, a defendant would typically have two barristers representing them. Marten got through an extraordinary her first appearance at the Old Bailey, in March 2023, to the end of the second trial, more than two years later, she had been represented by 14 had she got through so many?"Because she thinks she's entitled and doesn't listen to instructions," a source close to one of her former legal teams told the also changed his legal team and ended up representing caused significant delays - the couple's first trial overran by about three months, while the second overran by nearly two months. 'She is not running this trial' Their "antics", as the judge put it, got increasingly worse as the second trial went on and repeatedly didn't turn up, meaning many court days were lost and jurors were hugely one of them would say they weren't well enough to come to court, only to be assessed as being medically fit to do so."Constance Marten is not running this trial," Judge Lucraft said firmly one day after she refused again to come to spent days complaining about her tooth pain. Court days were lost because of it. On one of those days she was found to be "medically fit" but "refused" to come."She is on trial for extremely serious offences and I've bent over backwards," the judge said. "I've given her more latitude than I suspect I ought to in some situations.""In my view this is a complete sham," he said later referring to Marten's absence. Despite Marten's complaints of tooth pain, she declined treatment. There were other highly unusual refused to attend court one day after she had become "very argumentative and abusive to the staff in prison", according to the note from HMP judge expressed his frustration again and again."This trial has had so many delays and quite frankly it is an insult to this court and to the jury", he said one day without jurors in the that particular day, the judge asked for Marten to join on a remote link from prison to explain why she wasn't at said she had been "lied on" and had asked to see a nurse but none were available."I am happy to come to court," she told the judge, "but yesterday at the Old Bailey I was abused for three hours by a guy in the cells next to me, shouting I am a baby killer."One day Gordon, who normally wore a shirt and tie, turned up in a blue and yellow prison escape suit - used to spot runaway prisoners. On another occasion it emerged his court trousers had gone judge, who said he could not be allowed in court in prison wear, remarked: "It would be a great shame to lose any more time through a lack of trousers." 'Don't touch me man' Marten and Gordon repeatedly ignored the judge's instructions not to speak to each other during breaks in their he started coming into court before they were brought up from the cells to stop it from happening, with a warning that if they didn't, he would put them in different day Marten repeatedly exhaled so loudly during the evidence that the whole courtroom heard."Huffing and puffing at the back of the court is not the way these proceedings are done," said the unimpressed judge. Other days she yawned complained of feeling tired and said she had never experienced anything like travelling to court and back. "There are women locked in a metal cage in a van." The chaotic lives of a couple who killed their baby daughterCourt papers reveal Marten and Gordon's failures as parentsMark Gordon is a psychopath, says woman he raped when he was 14Watch: How police traced Constance Marten and Mark Gordon Sometimes Marten and Gordon would abruptly blurt things out from the dock when they took issue with the were rude to some of the dock officers: When one tried to separate them after they tried to hug in the dock, Gordon kicked off."Don't touch me, man," said an irate Gordon amid the commotion before telling the dock officer to "shut up" when the judge and jury weren't in the the first trial, Gordon refused to return to the dock unless a dock officer was changed and then demanded to speak to the cell we heard loud arguing in the corridor behind the dock door between Marten and Gordon and dock officers. 'Deliberate attempt to sabotage' One of the most explosive moments in the couple's retrial happened when Marten was giving evidence. She suddenly blurted out to the jury that her husband had a "violent rape conviction".We all knew about Gordon's previous conviction. But the jury didn' ensure he received a fair trial, an order preventing the media from reporting Gordon's previous offences was put in place. It was never mentioned in front of the was a jaw-dropping moment, which set off an unforeseen chain of events."This is plainly a deliberate attempt by the defendant to sabotage the trial," the judge said after the jury was ushered out of the prosecutors, Joel Smith KC, described it as a "deliberate attempt to take a wrecking ball" to the the claimed Mr Smith had already told the jury about the conviction. He hadn't. She said she had been exhausted and later blamed her "agonising toothache"."I'm extremely tired and I am irate that this word 'deliberate' keeps being expounded in this courtroom," she said. From then on it was difficult to keep up with the flurry of twists and turns that followed. Gordon initially wanted the jury discharged in his judge agreed. He said he had "little choice" and that Gordon would be tried next year. But the case against Marten would continue "alone", he decided during legal then quickly changed his mind. "I can't do another year in prison," he pleaded with the judge. "I really beseech the court to allow this trial to continue," he the end, the case against Gordon continued. But the couple's behaviour appeared increasingly number of barristers in court started to dwindle. Marten sacked her lead barrister but kept her junior. Not long after, Gordon's barristers withdrew their said he had sacked them and then declared that he was representing himself with the help of a solicitor. She also eventually retrial had entered a whole new dimension. Unlike at the first trial, when Gordon would often sit looking zoned out with his eyes half shut, now he appeared problem was he wasn't a trained lawyer. It became hugely complicated. He often went on lengthy the jury in the room he would flip flop between complaining that things were "not fair" to turning the charm on, telling the judge that he was "tolerant", "kind", "patient" and gracious".Other days he would shout at the judge as he left the complained that he didn't have the same access as barristers. He wanted a desk, power to make legal applications and Archbold, a criminal law book running to more than 3,000 repeatedly asked for more and more time to get his head around the case. It led to huge delays."Do you want me to adjourn for three years while you do a law degree?" the judge said to him one times Gordon appeared overwhelmed. He even pleaded for a royal intervention, describing the monarch as "compassionate and merciful"."I ask the King in his mercy and those who work for him to help me," he the weeks went by, the judge warned Gordon a number of times that he might still remove him from the retrial because of the continued delays."It's simply him manipulating the system," the judge said on one occasion. One of the most gripping and unusual moments of the retrial was when Gordon cross-examined a barrister would be expected to be forensic, but there was a tenderness in how he asked questions."Who was hands on and gentle with the kids?" he asked. "Both of us… especially you," she replied."Was the baby always a priority?" "Absolutely, that's why we did what we did," Marten responded. "Our number one priority was Victoria. We were doing what we were doing for her."Marten cried when Gordon asked her about their four other children who had been taken into care. "Alright, babes," he said trying to comfort was a marked change in her demeanour questioned by her husband she spoke softly, but when she was cross-examined by the prosecution she bristled and became increasingly strident, before cutting short her time on the stand. 'I'm actually happy' When it came to the moment of the verdicts, the courtroom filled. There was silence. "Would the defendants please stand," the clerk said. They of gross negligence manslaughter for Gordon, the jury foreman told the court. Marten shook her head and crossed her of the same for her. She looked intensely at her partner. He leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes."It's a scam," Marten later shouted from the dock."It was an unfair trial," Gordon said told a dock officer: "I'm actually happy with the result because I will win the appeal."He then thanked the court usher. "It's been a pleasure."Up until the very last moments of their case Marten and Gordon were still disrupting, doing things their way. A couple who were so fixated on each other, they were unable to grasp what the jury was sure of: that it was their chaotic and dangerous choices that ultimately led to the death of their baby, Victoria. Additional reporting by Claire Ellison, Levi Jouavel and Daniel Sandford.
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Even in the dock, Constance Marten and Mark Gordon were caught up in their own world of delusion
The outsiders, the outlaws, the seemingly unlikely subjects of a nationwide manhunt, do not yet know it, but they have already spent their last night together for a long time to come. It is 27 February 2023 and, driven by desperation, the couple have come down from their hideout in the hills near Brighton and back to civilisation, in search of food. She goes into the convenience store, picks up a tin and puts it in her pocket to steal it. She changes her mind, takes it out and puts it back. She goes out to the cashpoint, makes a withdrawal from the account containing her trust funds and goes back in to buy some provisions. He is outside waiting, hood up. He is limping badly, using a stick, his shoeless foot is wrapped in plastic after sustaining an injury back up in the woods. The couple have been on the run for the best part of two months, trying to stay one step ahead of social services, her family and the police. But now the game is up. Someone has seen them and called 999. The police arrive. She claims her name is Arabella. But they already know that's a lie. Later, while being questioned, he will tell the police, 'My wife is a beautiful, intelligent woman', but for now, all the officers care about is, 'Where is the baby?' He asks for food. The police want to know, 'Where's the baby?' The couple aren't saying. All he cares about is food. They tear open a packet of crisps from the shopping and lay it out on the ground. Handcuffed, he kneels down and snatches at them with his mouth and teeth, grunting at the ground like a feral creature. An officer notes the unwashed, stale odour around them both. They smell like homeless people, he thinks. But that's hardly surprising – they are homeless people. Stressed, paranoid and dishevelled they are bound tight, even as they know the time has come to part. 'Daddy bear!' Constance Marten calls to Mark Gordon. 'Daddy bear.' Not once, not twice, but three times. 'Daddy bear.' She appears to be trying to reassure him. He calls back, 'Love you, babe.' She says, 'I love you.' 'Be good,' he says, 'I love you forever – forever and ever more.' She replies, 'You too. I love you, baby.' They seem like deranged lovers; a sort of Folie a Deux caught up in their own world of delusion. Crazed by deprivation and hunger; demented by recent and past events, and by the certain knowledge that the world has been looking for them. Where's the baby? The baby, their fifth child, Victoria, lies in a polypropylene bag, in an allotment shed with broken windows up the hill, where the police will come across her four days later. The couple do not disclose where the baby is, but the police find her dead, decomposing. Her tiny body is hidden beneath soil, as if it had been a portable grave, a mobile interment, not just soil, but assorted detritus; a few pages from The Sun, a rolled-up jacket, some empty sandwich wrappers and a bottle of petrol. They were out of their minds, Marten told the jury at her first Old Bailey trial. 'We were in a state of indecision, of fear and panic.' They thought of burying Victoria; they bought petrol and thought of cremating Victoria, like the burning ghats that Marten had seen in India. They thought of jumping into the fire and ending their lives with her. They didn't know what to do, so they carried their daughter around in the bag until she became too heavy, and then they began leaving the bag in the allotment shed. Victoria was still wearing a soiled nappy when she was found. Marten couldn't bear to change her dead baby's nappy, she said. The prosecution accused her of denying dignity to baby Victoria, even in death. 'You left her in a plastic bag, sitting in her own faeces?' 'Please, don't put it like that.' Baby Victoria's body was so decomposed that neither the cause of death nor the date of death could ever be scientifically known. Onto that blank page, a dark story could be written; a long and complex history, bound up in the lives of this seemingly ill-matched couple, who after their long parting on arrest and charge, were reunited for the first trial in the dock of Court 5 at The Old Bailey in January 2024, at the beginning of what would prove to be a long and painful legal odyssey, over 19 months and two trials, fraught with tension, disputes and delay. Transported back and forth each day from their respective prisons, Marten and Gordon often appeared hungry for each other's company. A dock officer was always between them, but they regularly talked across them as if they weren't there. Despite facing long prison terms after a sensational public trial, they still presented like new lovers, smiling at each other, eyes shining, chatting, whispering, passing notes, much to the mounting irritation of the judge. When Marten refused to see the Crown psychiatrist, the presiding judge, Mark Lucraft KC, said: 'My patience with her has been tried many, many times.' As the legal odyssey deepened, Gordon's behaviour became ever more disruptive and challenging, the judge claiming that between them they were trying to 'sabotage' or 'derail' the proceedings. Gordon wore tight-fitting clothes to court, often a pale blue shirt and tie, sometimes over a T-shirt, which on one occasion he pulled up over his face like a mask, apparently in protest because he had been unable to shave. Marten wore white and cream blouses and dark trousers with a scarf or wrap, her long dark hair often tucked behind one ear, her head inclined slightly, paying close attention. Gordon never gave evidence at the first trial. He had agreed to go into the box one Friday afternoon, but it was decided to delay the start of his evidence until the Monday. By then, he had changed his mind – no explanation was ever given. So the jury never heard from him. When Marten was called and left the briefly unlocked dock to walk across the court to the witness box, the atmosphere tightened. She had not even completed the oath when she asked for a toilet break and was led back through the dock to the cell area of the Old Bailey. We sat waiting, the whole court, including, I am certain, the judge, wondering if she would ever return, but she did. She looked ashen. A few minutes into her evidence: 'I am so sorry, I get very nervous public speaking. Could I get five minutes?'. The judge gently refused. She was in the box over many days, her evidence the centrepiece of the trial, her account at times both plausible and heart-rending, on the one hand, and quite fantastic and delusional on the other. Sitting a few yards from her was her mother, Virginie de Selliers, now in her sixties and a psychotherapist, who had been estranged from her daughter some years ago and made no detectable eye contact. In one outburst, Marten, the eldest of three siblings, proclaimed, 'I had to escape my family, because my family are extremely oppressive and bigoted and they wouldn't allow me to have children with my husband and will do anything to erase that child from the family line, which is what they did do.' Later, she spoke of being pursued through the courts by someone in her family, after 'I had spoken out about serious abuse by that family member.' The accusation hung there, unexplained. When the first trial ended without a verdict on the most serious charges, the Crown pressed for a retrial. This year, the couple faced a new jury accused, either of manslaughter by gross negligence or of causing or allowing the death of baby Victoria. This time, there was even greater chaos and delay. Both Marten and Gordon parted ways with their leading counsel. Gordon began representing himself, questioning his co-accused from the dock, with the aid of a microphone. He complained loudly and often of unfairness in the proceedings. This time, he started giving evidence but then refused to be cross-examined. Marten continued with junior counsel. She gave evidence but terminated her own cross-examination after the first few hostile questions. Until the moment of their meeting, in around 2015, the contrast between the lives of Marten and Gordon could hardly have been greater. She had grown up in ostensibly idyllic circumstances on a Dorset estate, her grandmother linked to the late Queen Mother, her father, Napier, a page to the late Queen Elizabeth. As she acknowledged in court, she had come from 'a very privileged background'. She was the beneficiary of a trust fund, and although that was subject to limitations she still had nearly £20,000 in her account at arrest. The jury at the first trial must have wondered about Gordon's background, and noted that he did not get a 'good character' direction from the judge, as Marten did. They were deliberately not told, as it would have been prejudicial to his position at trial. That changed in the second trial, after Marten made reference to Gordon's past, and he put his own history in play by alluding to his good upbringing. He was born in Birmingham of Jamaican heritage. He never knew his father. As a child, he moved with his mother to the United States, first to New York and then to Hollywood and Florida. More than 35 years ago, on 29 April 1989, when he was a boy of 14, he had burgled the home of his next-door neighbour and, with her children asleep nearby, subjected her to a prolonged and violent rape, armed with a knife and wearing a mask. A few days later, and shortly before being arrested, he had tried to repeat the crime at the home of a different neighbour, hitting the man of the house with a shovel when he was confronted before he could complete the assault. Gordon was initially sentenced to life imprisonment with no minimum term, but was freed after 20 years and deported back to the UK where he was registered as a sex offender and obliged to report his whereabouts regularly to the police – which he later failed to do. As Marten told the Old Bailey, she had met Gordon in an incense shop in east London in 2015. He had not long since returned to the UK and she had trained as a journalist and was considering starting a course at East 15 Acting School. Marten knew the shop owner who asked her to keep an eye on the only other customer as they briefly left. The customer was Gordon. They laughed about it, got talking, went for coffee and became, Marten said, 'good friends', the relationship only developing after they travelled together in South America, getting married in Peru. Although this was not in evidence, she apparently came back pregnant, knowing only that Gordon had been in prison in the US but not the nature of the crimes. She learned that from the police in 2017, I have been told. They seem like deranged lovers; a sort of Folie a Deux caught up in their own world of delusion. Crazed by deprivation and hunger; demented by recent and past events The Florida records reveal a further terrible incident, disclosed by his mother in testimony at a sentencing hearing. When he was aged four and still in Birmingham, his mother Sylvia Satchell worked as a nurse for Chrysler and left Gordon in a daycare facility where a number of other children at the nursery were targeted. Gordon's mother told the court in Florida that the abuser went to prison 'for a little while,' but it isn't hard to see that behind the tragic death of Victoria lay a story of a cycle of physical and psychological harm that will sadly stretch further into the future. Gordon and Marten had five children together. The first and second children were taken into care in 2019 and the third and fourth children were subject to Emergency Protection Orders after their births in 2020 and 2021. The couple turned up in Wales in 2017, living in a tent as she went to hospital to have her first baby. She gave a false name and pretended to be an Irish traveller – maintaining the accent even as she gave birth. Gordon turned up and when challenged on his false name became aggressive. Police were called and he was charged with assaulting multiple officers and went briefly to prison. It was never suggested by their evidence or from their behaviour in court that Marten was in any way under Gordon's influence or control. In fact, for much of her testimony, it seemed that she was fully invested and often driving their haphazard plans. There was however a jarring episode that emerged in the potted history of their interactions with social services and the family courts that was summarised for the criminal trial. A family court judge had ordered their oldest two children to be taken into care in 2019 after finding that there had been a single but dramatic episode of domestic violence. According to Marten, she had accidentally fallen out of the window of their apartment. She ended up in hospital for eight days with a ruptured spleen. She vehemently denied that Gordon had pushed her out, but that was what the family judge found. There was no evidence of coercive controlling behaviour by Gordon at the trial and it was certainly not reflected in Marten's account or her demeanour. Instead, she said had 'slept with the devil' when she engaged with social services. She loved her children – the couple had four children, before Victoria, and all are now in care – she had been an excellent mother to them, she said, and she would do anything to get them back. In court, she blurted out that her two youngest children had recently been removed from foster care after allegations of physical abuse by the male carer. It turned out to be true – confirmed by police inquiries. There was apparently no end to the tragic cycle of events. Marten claimed: 'The problem I had was I was not just up against social services but family members who were very influential with huge connections in high places, including parliament, if they said to social services jump, they'd say how high.' It was against this backdrop, she suggested, that the couple had gone on the run in December 2022, giving birth to baby Victoria at a cottage in Northumberland, by her account, on Christmas Eve, going on the run, hiding the baby to prevent her being taken into care. Perhaps too, Gordon's juvenile convictions played a part in their outlaw way of life and in the attitude of the authorities towards them. Marten and Gordon's paranoia was high. Marten told the court that family members had hired private detectives to pursue them. There had been private investigators – two teams apparently - but that was sometime earlier. She alluded to the belief that the detectives might have tampered with their cars, after one broke down and the replacement caught fire on the M61 near Manchester. That was on 5 January 2023, when the police found baby Victoria's placenta and the high-profile nationwide search for the couple began. Marten and Gordon kept to taxis after that, spending £100s on fares as they zigzagged across the country, trying to stay ahead of the police and the publicity. It drove them further and deeper from the world. With the tragic end on the South Downs on January 9th, 2023, when Victoria was just 16 days old. Despite the seriousness of the charges, in court it felt, at times, like the case had become a trial of Marten's mothering – 'aggressive, bullish', as Marten's KC, Francis Fitzgibbon, put it in his description of the way the case had been pursued in the first trial. Questions were often repeated over and over in their cross-examination of Marten; she didn't carry her baby properly or support its neck. She didn't dress the baby properly, she didn't feed the baby properly, she let the baby get too cold. What was the baby doing in a tent? Why wasn't she at home in the warm? On Marten's account – her consistent version of events – she had breastfed the baby, while sitting cross-legged on the floor of the small tent in which they were living, Victoria resting and finally sleeping on her lap. Marten would say she fell asleep too, exhausted, and slumped forward over her baby. 'She wasn't moving when I woke up. I don't know how long I'd been asleep. I saw she wasn't moving and her lips had gone blue… I tried to resuscitate her for like, well I tried to breathe in her mouth and pump her chest. There was no response. I cradled her… I didn't know what to do.' She told police she held her like that for hours. 'I think Mark was telling me that I had to let go because it's not good to hold her like that, because it probably wouldn't be good for my state of mind, so I wrapped her up in a scarf and then I think we put her in a bag. I didn't know what to do after that.' They could have dialled 999, of course. But they were outlaws together, alone again, just the two of them, unable to rise above their fate. They are now facing further years of separation, in prison, after both were convicted of the gross negligence manslaughter of baby Victoria by the second trial jury. The first trial had convicted them of concealing the birth of a child, child cruelty and perverting the course of justice. Sentencing will take place at a later date.
New Statesman
an hour ago
- New Statesman
Labour's misguided assault on Palestine Action
Metropolitan Police officers surround a demonstration against Palestine Action's proscription as a terrorist organisation, before arresting the in Parliament Square on July 12, 2025. Photo byAt the weekend (12 July) more than 70 people were arrested under anti-terror legislation at protests in support of the now proscribed organisation, Palestine Action. The group are the first non-violent, direct action group to have been designated a terrorist organisation in the UK, and are now listed alongside Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram and the neo-Nazi group National Action – a member of whom is currently serving a life sentence for planning the assassination of former Labour MP, Rosie Cooper, in 2018 – under the Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The proscription of Palestine Action is not only a wildly disproportionate act against a group whose targets have been confined to the state and corporate infrastructure that supports the Israeli military. It is sure to have chilling effects on the already dwindling right to protest. The proximate cause, as Huw Lemmey has convincing argued, is the 'wider effort to limit jury nullification', where a jury acquits a defendant as a matter of conscience regardless of whether or not they have broken the law. Fearing embarrassment if 'the chasm between government policy and public opinion' is exposed by a jury acquittal, the government has decided it is better off avoiding juries altogether. Even so, there is a wider context at work. The action against Palestine Action is merely the latest punitive measure against non-violent protesters. In July last year, five activists from Just Stop Oil were sentenced to between four and five years for conspiring to block traffic on the M25 – imprisoned, in effect, for being on a Zoom call, and for far longer than many who are convicted of serious sexual assault or other violent crimes. While those prosecutions began under a Conservative government, the sentences were handed down weeks into Keir Starmer's term of office. Tellingly, the former human rights lawyer refused to intervene, while his home secretary Yvette Cooper has since defended the Tories' 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act and its 2023 Public Order Act, which introduced even more draconian anti-protest legislation. It was only action by the civil rights group, Liberty, that got some of regulations contained in the 2023 act quashed. On the right, meanwhile, the case of Lucy Connolly, who was sentenced to a 31-month jail term for inciting race hate after calling for protestors to set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers, has become a minor cause célèbre. While the claims that she is a 'political prisoner' are clearly absurd, her lengthy sentence has only served to further erode trust in Britain governing institutions. Labour are, of course, no strangers to this kind of social authoritarianism. Between 1997 and 2010, New Labour pursued a brand of authoritarian populism that even Keir Starmer has yet to reach. The socially restrictive measures introduced under Blair and Brown include the issuing of Asbsos for low-level social intimidation, the effects of which were further exacerbated by a 'name and shame' campaign that included the targeting of children as young as 10, the failed attempt to extend detention without charge to 90 days for terror suspects, and the escalation of police stop-and-search powers. Yet then, as now, it is who is targeted, and who evades justice, that shines the starkest light on the priorities of the British political system. While elderly grandmothers are thrown in jail for holding placards on public streets, others far more guilty of degrading the fabric of British society get away scot-free. Here I must confess something of a certain personal stake. In 2013, my second cousin was sentenced to nine months in prison for allegedly stealing thousands of pounds while running a sub post office. Of course, what we now know is that he was just one of around 1,000 innocent people who were falsely prosecuted due to failures in the Post Office's Horizon IT system. At least 13 of those implicated have subsequently taken their own lives. Yet the people who hold ultimate responsibility for this national scandal, the largest miscarriage of justice in British legal history, have, beyond public opprobrium and the odd lost directorship, continued to avoid justice. The question of jail time has barely even been raised. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The same is true of water bosses. Only three people have ever been prosecuted for obstructing the Environment Agency in its investigations into sewage spills, none of whom even received a fine for doing so. Hundreds of cases of illegal spilling have been identified in the past few years alone; all occurred as privatised water firms paid out billions in dividends, while cutting back services, raising prices and saddling debt amounting to hundreds of millions of pounds onto the stricken companies. The government's recent water bill does strengthen its powers, but we are yet to see them utilised – all while groups like Palestine Action feel the full force of the state. All of this is deeply damaging to the public's faith in government and its institutions, already at historical lows. Last month it was revealed that just 19 per cent of the public think the British political system needs little or no improvement, while only 12 per cent trust governments to put the country's interest before their party's. The rot started long before Starmer's premiership. As Dominic Cummings, hardly a left-wing populist, has repeatedly and correctly stressed, one of the long-term factors in this was the absence of any institutional accountability for those behind the 2008 financial crisis. The shadow of 2008, long and ever darker, stretches across the contemporary social and economic landscape. We still live in the world made by the crisis. Yet repeated governments, both Labour and Conservative, have failed to face squarely the damage it has caused, let alone those who caused it. This government has acted most aggressively against the 'working people' it claims to serve. Being responsible, knowingly, for the false prosecution of over thousand people gets you just 15 minutes of televised infamy, while those who spray red paint on a few airplanes, not to mention those who do no more than wear the name of a now disbanded organisation on a t-shirt, face prosecution and jail terms of up to 14 years. It is clear evidence of a government that doesn't know who it represents, and deserves every ounce of scorn poured on it. [See also: Welcome to hot Palestine Action summer] Related
