Chichester Crown Court — Rolling Stones Drug Trial (1967)

Following the notorious February 1967 police raid on Keith Richards' Redlands estate in West Wittering — an event immortalised by the image of Marianne Faithfull wrapped in a fur rug — Mick Jagger and Richards appeared at Chichester Magistrates Court on May 10, 1967, where they pleaded not guilty and requested trial by jury. The full trial was then heard at the West Sussex Quarter Sessions, held at Chichester Crown Court, from June 27 to 29 under Judge Leslie Block. Jagger was convicted of unlawful possession of four amphetamine tablets he had purchased legally in Italy; Richards was convicted of allowing his home to be used for cannabis smoking.

The sentences handed down on June 29 — three months in prison for Jagger, a year for Richards — provoked a national outcry that went well beyond the music world. The Times published its landmark editorial "Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?", written by editor William Rees-Mogg, which argued that the two men had been prosecuted disproportionately because of who they were. Within weeks, both convictions were overturned on appeal. The episode became one of the defining culture-war moments of the 1960s: a collision between the establishment and the counterculture, played out in a small Sussex city that had never seen anything quite like it.

Chichester Crown Court continues to operate today from its Southgate address in the centre of the city — an unassuming building that gives little indication of the historical weight of the proceedings it once hosted. The Redlands house itself, a short drive away in West Wittering, remains in Richards' ownership. Together the two locations form a kind of accidental monument to the moment the Rolling Stones took on the law — and, in the end, won.