The trial was repeatedly punctuated by legal challenges from island residents, who denied the island's colonial status, and with it the United Kingdom's judicial authority. Defence lawyers for the seven accused men claimed that British sovereignty over the islands was unconstitutional: HMS "Bounty" mutineers, from whom almost all of the current island population is descended (together with Polynesians), had effectively renounced their British citizenship by committing a capital offence in the burning of the "Bounty" in 1790, they said. According to the Public Defender of the Pitcairn Islands Paul Dacre (who was appointed in 2003), islanders still celebrated this act annually by burning an effigy of the "Bounty" in a symbolic rejection of British rule. The defence maintained that the UK never made a "formal" claim to Pitcairn, and never officially informed the islanders that British legislation, such as the Sexual Offences Act 1956, was applicable to them.