Jury clears greenstein of terrorism charge

The tony greenstein terrorism acquittal followed a three-year investigation

It took the state almost a year just to decide whether to charge him. Counter Terrorism Policing South East arrested Greenstein at home on 20 December 2023, seizing his computers, hard drives and phones over a tweet he had posted five weeks earlier, after he was goaded online into saying he would support Hamas “against the Israeli army” as part of any force resisting what he called genocide. He was released on bail conditions that restricted what he could post online, a gag that stayed in place while the CPS deliberated. The formal charge did not arrive until 25 November 2024, almost a year after the raid and more than a year after the tweets themselves.

By the time the case reached Kingston Crown Court this month, three years had passed since a middle-aged pensioner’s laptop was carried out of his house in an evidence bag. The trial itself suggested the state was no more comfortable with its own case in court than it had been in charging it. Judge Sarah Plaschkes KC repeatedly stopped proceedings and restricted defence evidence about the history of Gaza and the Israeli blockade, telling Greenstein not to turn the trial into “a political forum.”

The clearest sign of that discomfort came after Greenstein’s own closing address to the jury, delivered in person once his barrister stood down to let him speak directly. It drew spontaneous applause from the public gallery. Judge Plaschkes told the court she had considered contempt-of-court proceedings against him for it, before deciding his was “a rambling speech delivered by an old man” that would not have swayed the jury. She did not pursue it. A judge who thought the case worth possibly punishing a defendant’s own defence speech was, by her own account, unconvinced that speech had actually done anything.

A pattern, not an isolated case

Greenstein is not the only pro-Palestine campaigner to have been drawn into the machinery of terrorism law since October 2023. The same period has produced prosecutions including the “Barclays Five” and the “Filton Four,” cases in which defence lawyers including Pete Weatherby KC have argued that protest conduct was “very far from terrorism.” Anas Mustapha of CAGE International, which supported Greenstein’s defence, said after the verdict that “the jury returned a unanimous not-guilty verdict in record time”, a pointed way of noting how little the prosecution’s case had actually held up once it met twelve ordinary people.

That timing matters beyond this one case. The Starmer government’s Courts and Tribunals Bill, which would have stripped jury trial rights from many either-way offences, passed its Commons second reading by 304 to 203 earlier this year over a large Labour rebellion. David Lammy, the bill’s architect as justice secretary, had once said the opposite: in 2020 he called criminal trials without juries “a bad idea.” Starmer himself, before he was prime minister, argued as a human-rights barrister that jury trials maintain the balance between state power and the individual. Andy Burnham, who became prime minister on 20 July, is now reviewing the bill’s jury-restricting clauses, citing the lessons of Hillsborough-era miscarriages of justice. Greenstein has drawn the obvious conclusion: a judge sitting alone, he argued, would “almost certainly” have convicted him.

The record his critics raise

None of this makes Greenstein an uncomplicated figure, and a full account has to hold that too. He was expelled from the Labour Party in 2018 following a National Constitutional Committee finding of harassment and abusive language, after a 2016 suspension over antisemitism allegations. In May this year the Green Party, which he had since joined, permanently expelled him over further antisemitism allegations, a decision made on 7 May but not communicated to him until 29 June, weeks before his terrorism trial began. In 2020 the High Court dismissed a libel claim he brought against the Campaign Against Antisemitism after it called him a “notorious antisemite.”

Those are matters of public record and we report them as such, without adopting either side’s verdict on them. What they do not do is answer the question a jury was actually asked: whether three tweets amounted to inviting support for a proscribed organisation. On that specific, narrow test, applied by twelve people who heard four days of evidence, the answer was no, unanimously, in the time it takes to eat lunch. Greenstein’s own view of the law that nearly took years of his life is unambiguous. “The Terrorism Act is not about terrorism,” he said outside court. “It’s about terrorising people in this country.”

The CPS charging decision that produced this case has not been publicly defended or explained since the verdict. Three years, one dawn raid, a seized laptop and a maximum sentence of 14 years produced a jury deliberation shorter than the drive from Brighton to Kingston.