FOUR Stroud residents have taken the unusual step of writing to the Solicitor General inviting him to arrest them. 

Val Saunders, Lizzie Cambray, Stuart Drysdale and David Lambert are part of a new campaign focused on the threat to the principle of trial by jury. 

Mr Lambert said: "Over the last couple of years, ministers and MPs have expressed frustration when juries have found defendants charged with crimes associated with acts of conscience not guilty. 

"Then in March, the judge in a trial of climate protesters who blocked the M25 ruled that they must not mention climate change or the motivation for their actions in their evidence to the jury.  

"When in April another protester held up a sign outside the court which read ‘Jurors, you have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to your conscience’ she was arrested and is currently facing a two-year jail sentence for contempt of court. 

"Since then further protests have seen the same sign being held up by many more protesters outside crown courts, and now they have written to the Solicitor General saying they should be arrested for contempt of court too.   

"The signs’ words are no less than a statement of the law, as inscribed on a stone plaque in the Old Bailey read by every juror there, commemorating a trial in 1670 which ‘established the right of juries to give their verdict according to their convictions.’   

"We are doing nothing more than upholding the law. Jurors swear an oath to deliver a verdict according to the evidence not just the law as interpreted by the judge.  

"This government and willing members of the judiciary seem determined to undermine this basic principle of English common law, that a defendant has the right to explain why they did what they did, and a jury has the right to the whole truth as well as nothing but the truth."