NY should follow UK’s lead and jail unlawful protesters

New York is girding for a late summer and fall of unrest and disruption, as anti-Israel college students return to campus and the presidential election looms.

But the protests would have a better chance of staying peaceful — as demonstrators frequently claim to intend — if the city took a lesson from Britain, where prosecutors and judges are applying the law so that illegal actions of demonstrators of all political stripes have real consequences.

Last month, UK judge Christopher Hehir shocked Britain when he handed down a five-year jail sentence to Roger Hallam, a climate activist with the Just Stop Oil movement, and four-year sentences to four of his accomplices.

The convictions came as the result of a 2022 British law criminalizing “conspiracy to commit a public nuisance,” defined as any action that causes “direct harm” to the public.

In this case, Hallam & Co. didn’t take any violent action: Hehir ruled they conspired to “cause a nuisance” by shutting down a major highway, the M25 in southern England, for several days in November 2022.

The conspiracy occurred when the activists organized their blockades via an open-to-the-public Zoom meeting recorded by a journalist. The call recruited dozens of people to participate in the shutdown, which caused gridlock in four counties over four days.

In imposing the sentences, Hehir’s words were refreshing: The five individuals, he said, all well into adulthood, willfully broke the law and caused nearly $2.5 million in damages for the traffic delays and belated police responses — and, crucially, they understood the potential consequences of their actions.

The “harm” imposed by the defendants, Hehir ruled, was “intended”— their rolling roadblocks forced people to miss flights, funerals, exams and more.

And, he said, the climate “emergency” the defendants cited to justify their action was not an excuse, but an aggravating factor, in sentencing.

“Because your perspective is basically that the criminal law really doesn’t matter because of climate change,” Hehir wrote, “there is a real risk of each of you committing further serious offences . . . unless you are deterred from doing so.”

And no mitigating factors, he ruled, could get them off the hook.

Not being a caregiver to family members: It was, Hehir wrote of one defendant, “a great pity that by choosing to involve yourself in offending of this seriousness, you have put people close to you in a difficult position.”

Not youth: To the youngest defendant, age 22, he observed, “You are a highly intelligent and well-educated young woman. Neither immaturity nor personal disadvantage has driven you to crime — your own conscious choices have.”

The same judge has told two separate climate-action defendants, both 22-year-old women who threw soup at a Van Gogh painting at the National Gallery, to prepare themselves to begin a prison term upon sentencing for a criminal-damage offense next month.

This strictness is hardly a form of bias against left-wingers: Other British judges are handing down long sentences, as much as three years’ imprisonment, against the right-wing rioters who erupted after the murder of three children in northwest England last month, based on a false rumor that the killer was a recent migrant.

Contrast this swift, sure justice with the political vacillation in New York after recent disruptive demonstrations, mostly related to Israel and Gaza: the takeover of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall in April, takeovers of last year’s Thanksgiving Day parade and this year’s Pride celebration, and repeated, purposeful delays of both road and rail traffic.

Police routinely arrest dozens of people at these events for breaking an array of laws, from low-level ones like trespassing and disorderly conduct to higher-level laws such as burglary.

And the city’s prosecutors, including Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg in the wake of the Columbia riot, just as routinely drop or downgrade the charges.

Even leaders of these “protests” remain free, while vowing to continue breaking the law.

Perhaps a years-long jail sentence is overkill for a one-time road blockage.

But why don’t New York’s prosecutors, Bragg chief among them, start small, by actually pressing charges for repeat violations such as disorderly conduct or criminal nuisance?

And why not request the sentences that state law allows for such charges, anywhere from a few days to several months?

Why not take some of these low-level cases to juries to convict, as British prosecutors have done in their climate-change cases?

Yes, the United States has a First Amendment, which Britain lacks — but the Bill of Rights protects truly peaceful protests, not chronic low-level lawbreaking.

As Judge Hehir put it, “fanaticism” that causes someone to be “entirely heedless of the rights of . . . fellow citizens” must be punished, to “hopefully deter others.”

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.