Apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany needed compliant judges to provide a legal veneer to their darkest crimes.

Judge Johnson joins their wretched company. He overturned a jury's conviction of four anti-genocide activists for criminal damage and sentenced them as terrorists instead.

As one their barristers pointed out, the four defendants were initially arrested by police on suspicion of involvement in an act of terrorism. But the prosecution decided not to charge them with terrorism offences because it knew no jury would ever convict them based on the evidence.

Instead the Crown held two trials: a sham one for the jury, and the real one conducted in secret by the judge. That is not justice. It is a show trial worthy of the worst tyrannical regimes.