2 – 16 April 2024

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.