Matteo Tiratelli.

In the summer of 2014, I was called for jury service at the Inner London Crown Court. At the time, trials relating to the 2011 riots in England were still working their way through the court system, and one of my first cases involved a man who had been arrested near the site of the riots in Croydon, south London.

The original trial had broken down when the last set of jurors were given the man’s rucksack to examine and promptly discovered that the items contained within it didn’t match the police’s inventory. At the retrial, the police skirted over these investigatory errors. The jury eventually reached a unanimous verdict of not guilty.

This is just one example of the 3,000 plus arrests made in the wake of the English riots of 2011. But, for those not personally involved, one of the most remarkable things about those events was how (more…)