XR Suffragettes Face Trial
The women are on trial for an action which took place at 7am on April 22nd 2021, during which they cracked the glass in several of the windows of HSBC’s HQ in Canary Wharf, London. The women wore patches reading ‘better broken windows than broken promises’ and placed stickers on the windows of the bank reading ‘£80 billion into fossil fuels in the last 5 years’ before cracking the glass using hammers and chisels.
If found guilty the women—Jessica Agar, Blyth Brentnall, Valerie Brown, Eleanor (Gully) Bujak, Clare Farrell, Miriam Instone, Tracey Mallaghan, Susan Reid and Samantha Smithson—face potential sentences of up to four years in prison.
Valerie Brown, just after arrest for Window Breaking Suffragette Action
This is the tenth Extinction Rebellion case to be heard in a Crown Court, and the third of seven upcoming trials for women’s window breaking actions, following in the tradition of the suffragettes. The retrial of Extinction Rebellion co-founder Gail Bradbrook for breaking a window at the Department for Transport in 2019 is also due to begin on October 30th at Isleworth Crown Court.
Of the members of Extinction Rebellion to have faced trial before a jury to date, twenty have been found ‘not guilty’ and eighteen have been found ‘guilty’.
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