This is where British justice falls down – a lot. No witnesses saw Mark Duggan throw a firearm away and yet a jury decided by a margin of nine members to one that he was in possession of it and got rid of it. On what factual evidence were they basing this conclusion? None that I can tell.
This is not the first time that I have seen juries reach verdicts based on no factual evidence at all; a friend of mine won an appeal against conviction for a particularly nasty crime, but this meant the case had to go back for retrial and he was convicted again, even though there was no evidence to support the prosecution; the police simply hadn’t bothered to investigate whether anyone else could have committed the alleged crime, or whether a crime had even been committed.
This raises a lot of questions, and answers one.
That question being: Is the British legal system really the best it could possibly be?