Thursday, 18 April 2024 — Institute of Race Relations
This week, adding to a growing number of voices and campaigns rejecting the normalisation of systemic injustice in the criminal legal system, we publish a special issue of Race & Class featuring several important interventions.
Providing much-needed scrutiny of the courts, Eithne Quinn exposes how drill rap lyrics are used to build secondary liability in group prosecutions, whilst Nisha Waller and Naima Sakande expose the hidden racist and classist prejudices behind the shift from unanimous to majority verdicts in England and Wales in 1967. To find out more about race, juries and wrongful convictions, law charity APPEAL are holding an upcoming event to discuss their full findings.
Taking readers to the US context, Falguni Sheth explores the judicial act of dismissal in discrimination cases, which builds on court cases involving Muslim women to expose the long history of the silencing of women of colour in the US courts. Read the full issue online here, or purchase a hard-copy from the IRR website for £6.
Drawing our attention to how the judicial system perceives and treats those seeking asylum, this week IRR Trustee Frances Webber was featured on the Still We Rise podcast to discuss the prosecution and conviction of Ibrahima Bah – a young Senegalese asylum seeker sentenced for nine and a half years after being held criminally responsible for the drowning of at least four people. Following on from her article ‘No Safe Routes’ in the London Review of Books, Webber outlines how legal outcomes are often influenced by political imperatives – the consequences of which are recorded in our regular calendar of racism and resistance.
IRR News team
Systemic injustice and the criminal legal system
Racism seeps into every aspect of criminal ‘justice’ and radical scholars are exposing the breadth and depth of the issue. The April 2024 issue of Race & Class contains cutting-edge articles on the criminal legal system, adding to a growing number of campaigns voices rejecting the normalisation of systemic injustice in the courts.
Drill rap lyrics are used regularly by police and prosecutors as plausible evidence against young Black working-class defendants in UK criminal cases. In the lead article, ‘Racist inferences and flawed data: drill rap lyrics as criminal evidence in group prosecutions’, Eithne Quinn, professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester, examines state interpretations of drill lyrics in the preparation of serious crime cases, focusing on a 2020 joint enterprise murder case in London. By forensically unpacking the way the state uses violent rap lyrics to build secondary liability in group prosecutions, she shows how drill lyrics are quoted to invoke popular stereotypes and even mislead the court.
A fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe.
Calendar of Racism & Resistance
In this week’s Calendar of Racism and Resistance, we highlight stories unfolding over the past two weeks in asylum and migrant rights, human rights and discrimination, policing and anti-Palestinian racism in the UK and Europe.
Find these stories and thousands more on our Register of Racism and Resistance database.
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We are currently selling all IRR and Race & Class materials at 50% off. Check out our shop to find books, pamphlets, reports, Race & Class journals and more, all at half price.
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Institute of Race Relations
The New Dark Age 
https://www.inpowermovement.org/
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Okay, I’ve checked out the site and I can’t disagree with anything it says but it kinda duplicates a lot of stuff already out there on 5g, vaccines, smart meters et al.
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