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Well, it depends - which country, and who you owe to. If you owe the council for local taxes, you can (and people have) been sent to jail for a short time to name one, popularised case.

Similarly you can (in the UK) be sent down for not paying child maintenance payments.

your citation sir
http://www.findlaw.co.uk/law/b...

But still, my point is about the inequity of life - if you''re a big player things are applied differently to you.

Is Glasgow filled with some sort of protected class? Lot of Africans, or Muslims? Was the joke meant to be racist?

No more than any other major city. Anecdotally I'd say far less so than the south of the UK, but I don't have numbers to hand, so take that as opinion rather than fact.

Or just anti-life?

Basically, this. It could be construed as "classist", as Glasgow's primary reputation is being something of a rough city (or a tough/hard city from a local's point of view). - however the irony isn't lost on me that Sunderland (where the 'tweeter' resides) isn't exactly god's kingdom either. An argument could also be made that Scots themselves are a minority, having only ~10% of England's population. (Easy to miss, the accident occurred in Scotland but the accused is in the north of England).

But mostly, he just seems to be a dick. And that's much less protected here than it is in the US.

This is one of the biggest differences between the US & UK legal cultures. While basically similar systems (they share the same "common law" roots), they're exercised entirely differently. The US deals very much with absolutes, and the letter of the law. Most of your primary rights are the right to dissent - and understandably so, since it's what your nation was built upon. To this end you have free speech, press, assembly, firearms, etc. That is, the right to have a dissenting opinion, to share/publish this opinion, to vote on it, to protest, etc. All the way up to having enough guns around that the govt should be wary of the people - although personally I'd argue this one's now a futile effort given the govt clearly won that arms race ...

But I digress; In the UK the law is very much more intent based. So we don't have free speech as an absolute - we judge each on its merits. So political speech, satire, etc are essentially protected speech - very much in line with the intent of your first amendment - but public disorder, breech of the peace, hate speech, etc, very much less so - which runs contrary to the letter of your first amendment.

This one falls into an odd gray area though. We have no obligation to provide a platform for free speech. So while this wouldn't have been seen has malicious if shared as a joke between friends, it falls foul of the Malicious Communications Act, which allows for something like;

Section 1 of the Act covers the sending to another of any letters, electronic communications, photographs and recordings that are indecent, grossly offensive or which convey a threat (which may be false), provided there is an intention on the part of the sender to cause distress or anxiety to the person who receives them.
The offence refers to the sending, delivering or transmitting, there is no requirement for the communication to reach (or be read by) the person who is intended to read it.

( http://www.findlaw.co.uk/law/c... )

So this is where we end up with situations which can appear absurd. Someone makes a complaint to the police. The police satisfy themselves that there's reasonable grounds that such a communication has been sent. But it's not up to the police to judge the intent ("provided there is an intention on the part of the sender ..."). This ends up in essentially a three-step process, where the police may find sufficient rounds to make an arrest, then the CPS ("Crown Prosecution Service", roughly a public prosecutor or attorney general) may find sufficient grounds to press charges, and then a judge/court may find an actual offence.

So far, only the first of these steps has happened.

This gives an interesting take on free speech in the UK FindLaw UK

Don't say "ask another lawyer" when you're clearly not a lawyer. I don't know what you're on about mentioning the UK is based on common law not constitutional law, yes, well done, so what, what was the insertion of that random factoid about exactly? Do you feel that if you add in random quotations about different law in different jurisdictions that that somehow adds weight to your argument on this particular case? It really doesn't, it looks like a really really poor attempt at misdirection.

Criminal copyright infringement isn't about receiving a benefit, it's about seeking to profit, directly or indirectly. You keep trying to avoid the word profit and switch to things like "benefit" but like it or not, UK copyright law revolves around profiting, which is subtly different to benefiting.

But enough of your nonsense, enough of your "go ask another lawyer", he's what the IPO, the UK's intellectual property office, the organisation that oversees IP has to say about it:

"Deliberate infringement of copyright on a commercial scale may be a criminal offence. Please see further information on What is IP crime? and the additional remedies which may be available."

http://www.ipo.gov.uk/copy/c-o...

Personal sharing no matter to how many people isn't by definition commercial in nature and so cannot be of commercial scale, and that's before you even question how you might prove someone using BitTorrent is deliberately distributing something, most users don't even know it uploads too, they think they're just downloading anyway so proving deliberate infringement in itself would make it an impossible criminal prosecution.

If you want to continue to argue otherwise rather than pretending to be a lawyer, which you're clearly not, please provide me one single case where someone has been hit with a successful criminal prosecution for personal sharing.

No? couldn't find one? gee, I wonder why that might be? I'll give you a hint: it's because you're still completely wrong, as much as you refuse to admit it. The police do not even pursue personal file sharing precisely because it is not criminal.

Of course if you're still adamant that you want to keep digging I guess I could do as you say and ask a lawyer too (but again, not "another" lawyer, because again, you're clearly not one despite your implication), and they might say something like:

"It is also possible for a person to face criminal prosecution for copyright infringement, but the copyright statutes in the UK in effect limit the offence to the large-scale distribution of pirated material for financial gain."

http://www.findlaw.co.uk/law/c...

So are you going to stop digging now or is this enough information for you to now be able to accept that you had no idea what you were on about?

No. The forces at play would be massively diluted, so the issue would be lessened enormously.

To higher government, the money raised in these auctions is just spare change.

Incidentally, this is precisely how things are done in the UK. The proceeds of traffic tickets are handled similarly.

You need to look up the definitions of homicide, murder and manslaughter. Murder and manslaughter are types of homicide. In many jursdictions like Canada and the UK the offence is under the impaired driving statute.

How do I know race was in the equation? Because I've dealt with people enough to know the difference.

So what? It is not surprising that people given little, no or improper training will use profiling improperly. That does not mean that people could be not be trained to profile properly.

Citations, please:

As the level of alcohol consumption increases, so does the severity of the penalty.