Mark Duggan jury given police protection after 'vile' abuse

THE jury that concluded that police killed Mark Duggan lawfully has been granted anonymity and its members were given a police escort as they left court, the Daily Mail reports.

The ten jurors were given protection because of the "menacing" behaviour of Duggan's friends and supporters at the Royal Courts of Justice this week. After delivering their conclusion that the 29-year-old was lawfully killed when he was shot by police in July 2010, the jurors were subjected to "intimidation and vile abuse", the Mail says.

A former Met commander told the paper that the scenes of "near anarchy" in the aftermath of the verdict were unprecedented and that it was "totally unacceptable" for jurors to be intimidated for simply doing their public duty.

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The judge who heard the case acknowledged the stress placed on the jurors and told them they were excused from jury service for the rest of their lives if that was their wish. He also granted them anonymity - their names were never read out in court and they were referred to by number rather than name.

The lawful killing conclusion has continued to cause repercussions, with Duggan's fiancee Semone Wilson refusing to apologise for the abuse of jurors. She told the Mail that the jeering and fury that followed the verdict was justified because "we were all angry".

Meanwhile, The Guardian reports that the controversial stop and search tactics used by police may be "curtailed" in the wake of the Duggan case. The paper says the Home Secretary, Theresa May, plans to tell police to "conduct fewer searches with greater respect and crack down on officers unlawfully using their powers through ignorance or bias".

Research commissioned by the Guardian found ethnic minority Britons were subjected to nearly 1.5 million more stop and searches than if the police had treated them the same as white people, between 1999 and 2009. The rate of stop and search against black people during that period also doubled, the researchers found.