As some of you may have heard, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, was arrested on Friday as he Facebook-lived a group of Muslim men on trial for sex crimes against children in England.
Here’s video of the arrest:
https://twitter.com/CaolanRob/status/999936555862065152Once arrested, Robinson was quickly sentenced to 13 months in prison:
But shortly after his arrest, a source with knowledge of the case told Fox News that he had been jailed for 13 months on a contempt-of-court charge.
A court listing indicated the case was “closed” by Friday afternoon.
One source said he was jailed in Hull Prison. The prison declined to comment to Fox News on whether Robinson was there. Leeds Crown Court also did not return a request for information.
According to The Independent, Robinson was already on a suspended sentence for contempt of court over a gang rape case in 2017.
You could hear Robinson asking for a lawyer in the video above. Not sure if he ever got one before he was sentenced.
Also you could hear him also saying he has a suspended sentence, which agrees with the reporting above.
The judge then put a gag order on the press:
The judge in the case on Friday slapped a reporting ban on the case. The order bans reporters from reporting on a case if there is reason to believe the reporting could prejudice a trial. The order prevents reporting until the conclusion of the trial Robinson was reporting on.
The gag order led to news outlets in the U.K. removing their reporting from their websites to comply with the order. Most remaining reporting in the U.K. comments on Robinson’s arrest, but not on his purported sentencing.
Robinson does have a lawyer who is apparently very concerned about Robinson being killed in prison:
Sources with knowledge of Robinson’s case spoke on condition of anonymity in part because of fear they would be arrested for contempt. One told Fox that Robinson’s lawyer warned that, considering the presence of Muslim gang members in prison, a 13-month sentence was tantamount to a death sentence.
“Tommy’s lawyer said he will likely die in jail given his profile and previous credible threats, and the judge basically said he doesn’t care,” the source said. “He sentenced him to 13 months in prison.”
While we don’t know what happened in the courtroom, we might glean from a review of his 2017 suspended sentence that the courts in England work very hard to protect the judicial process, so hard that it infringes on freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Here’s a few screencaps from that 2017 judgement against Robinson that may shed light on this:
The judge in that case in 2017 said it wasn’t about free speech or freedom of the press, but rather protecting the justice system. By why can’t you have both?
There’s a reason in this country why juries are instructed not to look at media or TV while they are deliberating a case.
But in England it appears to be the opposite, that instead of trying to control the jury so that it is protected from outside influence, judges over there would rather use news gags and arrests to keep the outside influences silent. Maybe I’m wrong, but that seems to me to be a huge infringement on free speech and freedom of the press.
I don’t know very much about Tommy Robinson, but it sounds like he’s getting a pretty raw deal here.