JUDGE'S COMMENTS:AN IRISH Traveller couple convicted of holding homeless men in servitude and forced labour in England had displayed "pure evil" towards their victims, a judge said yesterday.
Sentencing James John Connors and his wife, Josie – two of four family members found guilty on Wednesday of multiple charges – Judge Michael Kay rejected claims made during the 13-week trial that the Travellers had been subjected to a conspiracy by the police.
“The defendants sought to suggest that they had done nothing wrong and the only reason they were on trial was because of racism against Irish Travellers,” he told the crowded courtroom at Luton Crown Court.
“It was suggested that they led an honourable and proud way of life which this prosecution was seeking to destroy,” he said, adding that the Connors had presented themselves as religious.
“The truth is this case is not about racism or the way of life of Irish Travellers, it is simply about a human being’s capacity to be inhumane to a fellow human being.”
The victims recounted during the trial how they had been forced to work under threat of violence and had slept in cramped, dilapidated conditions in old caravans or a one-time shed used as a dog kennel.
All were discovered emaciated and in desperately poor health during a police raid last September on the Connors’s Greenacres caravan site near Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire.
Judge Kay said: “The way in which these defendants, for their own financial benefit, brutalised, manipulated and exploited men who were already plumbing the depths of despair as homeless beggars is pure evil.
“Their behaviour is profoundly at odds with the moral code of the religion they profess and indeed of any moral code, whether it is based on religious or secular beliefs,” he went on. “Their complete disdain for the dignity and fundamental rights of their fellow human beings is shocking.
“They were not Good Samaritans seeking to assist their fellow man in his hour of need and treating him as they would wish to be treated, but violent, cold-hearted exploiters of his frailties and ill-fortune.”
During the trial, the court had heard that “it had long been the practice of Irish Travelling families to offer food and accommodation in return for labour to vagrants, or, as they were described, ‘men of the road’,” the judge said.
“Whatever may have been the position in the past, it is clear to me that James John Connors realised that there was a source of cheap labour available in our towns and cities.
“The homeless, addicted and isolated men who sleep rough and beg on the streets were potential workers who could be exploited for financial gain,” he added.
However, the promises of pay made to their victims were “a monstrous and callous deceit”, since “there never was any intention that they would be paid any significant sum”.
The couple had claimed, he said, that the treatment of the victims after they had been discovered and taken from the Bedfordshire caravan site last September was an attempt to persuade them to give false testimony.
The help from the Red Cross, the police and the Salvation Army was characterised “as sinister and improper inducements”, when it should, instead, stand in stark contrast to the Connors’s abuses.
Pointing to Britain’s history of slavery, Judge Kay said it had been abolished in the British empire in 1834 and its passing was “an important milestone” in human rights.
“It recognised the right of each human being to live a life of dignity free from the worst forms of oppression and exploitation.
“Thus what was commonplace until the 19th century in countries which presumed that they were civilised was rendered illegal.”
Britain had no laws after 1998 that specifically made slavery, servitude or forced labour a crime, but this was changed by a new law in April 2010.
“So it is that nearly 200 years after slavery was officially abolished, four defendants have stood trial over a period of three months and been convicted of holding their fellow human beings in servitude.”
The Connors family enticed the men with offers of pay before using “insidious methods of control and manipulation” to keep them under control once they were at Greenacres, he said.
James John Connors had used “brutality and intimidation” to govern the men, including punches, kicks, slaps or beatings to punish insubordination and impose “the hierarchy of control”.
Threats “of grave or even life- threatening consequences” were made to the men, who were isolated, stripped of their identity and degraded constantly.
“Workers lived in squalor in cramped and insanitary conditions [while] the defendants enjoyed the comforts of their lavishly appointed caravans or static homes,” said the judge.
Forced to work from 5am, the men were “constantly at the beck and call of their bosses at any time of the day or night to carry out even the most trivial acts of service” and ordered not to talk to outsiders.
Some left by “running away during the night” or when they were not observed, once they realised they were at risk of violence and were never going to be paid.
“There were only a small number who were so brutalised and degraded that their self- esteem and courage to take matters into their own hands were wholly undermined . . .
“They lost the independence of will required to escape. These men were valuable because they were a reliable source of essentially free labour for you,” he told James John Connors.
Josie Connors had benefited from the cleaning duties that were done by the men late at night or on Sundays – the only day they were free from working in her husband’s paving business.
