by Allison Pearson, Telegraph
An ugly social media post landed Lucy Connolly with a 31-month sentence – her treatment is a testament to our injustice system
It is many years since I clambered into a cage in Cambridge’s King’s Parade for Amnesty International and stared glumly through the bars at a photographer who snapped me for the front page of the student paper. On that drizzly, damp day, we were trying to draw attention to the plight of prisoners in authoritarian countries where people could be thrown into jail for no reason, except to deter other critics of the regime, and denied their basic human rights.
In the past few days, I’ve found myself wondering what that idealistic young student would have thought if you’d told her that, 40 years in the future, she would be writing about a woman thrown into jail in our own country largely to act as a warning to others. A widely-respected and adored childminder described by one parent as “the kindest British person I’ve met”, a mother of two children (one living, one dead), a carer to a sick husband, by whose side she also appeared in his role as a Tory councillor.
As I write this, that woman is not only serving a sentence many legal experts consider to be outrageously harsh, but is being denied the opportunity for time at home with her family which is granted to jailmates around her who are guilty of actual physical harm. “You’ve upset a lot of people, Lucy,” one probation officer explained when she asked why she was being denied ROTL (Release on Temporary Licence).
If the name Lucy Connolly rings a bell it’s because she was one of the 1,500-plus people arrested in connection with the social unrest which followed the July 29 Southport massacre of three little girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class. In fact, that’s not strictly accurate. Mrs Connolly, then aged 41 – she turned 42 in prison in January – played no part in the rioting, but a tweet she posted on the day when Elsie Dot Stancombe, Bebe King and Alice da Silva Aguiar were murdered by Axel Rudakubana was enough to get her arrested eight days later, and charged under Section 19 of the Public Order Act 1986, with publishing material intending to stir up racial hatred.