Slashdot Mirror
"Bomb Threat" Tweet Conviction Overturned By UK Appeals Court
New submitter Kupfernigk writes "Paul Chambers was the man who was convicted (in England) of a terrorist offense based on a tweet threatening to 'blow up' Robin Hood Airport because they couldn't get snow cleared. Despite the fact that it was obviously a (feeble) joke, the Crown Prosecution Service actually went ahead with a prosecution and were able to convince a junior judge sitting with magistrates. The senior judges, including the Lord Chief Justice, said 'We have concluded that, on an objective assessment, the decision of the Crown Court that this 'tweet' constituted or included a message of a menacing character was not open to it. On this basis, the appeal against conviction must be allowed.' In effect, they have said that the original decision was not made objectively, which can be considered a severe slap for the Crown Prosecutor."
A well deserved slap too.
"It's Twitter, remember, not the pub!"
Its not severe until the Crown Prosecutor gets fired and jailtime.
they have said that the original decision was not made objectively, which can be considered a severe slap for the Crown Prosecutor
Not really. A severe slap for the orginal judge, maybe, but at most a bit of a raised eyebrow at the Crown Prosecutor. The prosecution isn't supposed to try the case and decide who's guilty. Maybe the case should never have even been brought, but it's the original judge who really messed up severely for not saying so at first instance.
More on BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-19009344
FTA:
Today, Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge, [..], said: ”We have concluded that, on an objective assessment, the decision of the Crown Court that this 'tweet' constituted or included a message of a menacing character was not open to it."
When it's no longer clear where your title ends and your name starts, you've definitely found the right profession.
Donate free food here
The men who went ahead and tried to prosecute this guy are professional men. They get up early, and put on suits. They carry briefcases. They went to college and graduated. Within the entire spectrum of the human race, they are in the top 5% of education and work.
And they still went ahead with the prosecution of such an obvious joke.
I weep for the human race.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
Maybe he can be extradited to USA to face proper conviction after a brief tour in Guantanamo?
The Crown Prosecutor? Sounds like a plan.
There is a clear and substantial difference between "Following up" on something someone says and "Pointlessly dragging through the courts at great expense to the taxpayer someone who demonstrably hasn't done anything threatening, disruptive or illegal".
The guy shouldn't have even been arrested, at worst he should have been questioned by police and it quickly established that he didn't pose any threat. At which point he should have been released without charge, perhaps with a warning that doing what he did is likely to get the police interested in him and so isn't a great idea.
Not for long I'll bet. The only thing we can be sure about is that the crown prosecutor will be a little more careful in selecting scapegoats from now on. The War on Terror is an ongoing exercise in balancing what the executive arm and its organs can get away with and maximising the state of fear created in the public mind.
I hate printers.
Everything has its limits.
Only if you put limits on it.
Those limits are where your "free speech" results in real harm to other individuals.
Unlike in this case!
When you mindlessly apply these laws to people who clearly didn't intend to do any harm, you end up harming innocent people, degrading respect for the law, and wasting taxpayer money.
Plus, much of the people whining that no one can take a joke any more will be whining about why the police didn't follow up on the public comments of the next psycho who shoots up a mall or bombs a bus terminal, comments made before he did those atrocities.
No, because I don't worry about unlikely events, and I don't believe that people who are very likely not intending to do harm should be harmed just because there is a minuscule chance that they could. Incidentally, I also don't care for pro-TSA mentalities (everyone getting punished).
Now mod me as troll, because I don't tow the ridiculously naive and cluelessly idealistic slashdot party line on "free speech".
I think you picked the wrong story to make this comment on if that was your intention.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I disagree. I think he made the decision very objectively. He carefully weighed "I'm an overly-aggressive asshole" with "I support security theater over logic when it comes to airports" with "I'll be such a famous anti-terrorist, zero tolerance judge and get famous in the media" and made a logical decision. Of course, all he managed to do was get famous in the media lol. Time to start looking for a new job hopefully since he's proven to be completely incapable of doing his current one.
Are you afraid to speak your mind because something similar may happen to you?
If so, I guess this is not considered money "wasted" but "invested".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I found this challenging too. I think (caveat: filtered by my middle-American interpretation of English) the "it" refers to the Crown Court.
As in, "The Crown Court made a decision it had no objective reason to make."
It made a decision that was not open to it.
Corrections from across the pond?
You never said anything along the lines of "I'm going to kill that idiot" or "Best way to fix this is to just blow the shit up and cash in the insurance"? I did. And anyone with half a brain knows that it is said in jest. If you take someone serious who threatens to blow up an airport for his flight being late or the runway not being cleared of snow, I don't know who is the lunatic here, but I'd guess you'd win the contest.
The absolute maximum that I'd accept in this case is an investigation which will turn up that he is in general a pretty normal guy who just got ticked off by something going wrong. But jailing him?
Did common sense and rational thought get unpopular among judges?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My mother repeatedly and pointedly informed me on numerous occasions that she was going to kill me / would kill me if I performed action X (where X was a totally legal endeavour).
Should I have reported each instance to the police, be put into care, have my mother jailed, etc. for that? No.
"Free speech" is a misnomer in that what the average person calls "Free" is not what I call "Free" and isn't what the word "Free" means. Most people definition of "free speech" doesn't include hate speech, lies, threats or anything else. Thus it's not *technically* free.
If someone (say a UK police commissioner) wants to claim that, for example, most inner-city crime was committed by black people (a verifiable fact given the data at the time), then can we censor that because it could be construed as hate speech? Does that mean that a guy shouting that same fact in the street would be subject to different laws than a police commissioner saying it in a press conference? That's a dangerous precedent to set.
Is it also "against free speech" to lie? Surely if my speech is truly "free" I can say or claim anything? But that runs into libel laws and other problems (i.e. lying in court).
Thus there is no one fixed definition of this magical "Free Speech" and if you try to make an all-encompassing one you will absolutely fail unless you accept a world where people can freely lie all the time and where they can also never be harassed for telling the truth, or for lying (or, alternatively, where they can ALWAYS be harassed no matter what).
True free speech does not, and cannot exist, in the current political and legal climate or even, I would posit, at all. Thus it's pointless to consider it, which is why most countries do NOT have an explicit statement regarding free speech (and even some of the largest and most influential countries in the world have no formal legal statement of such a right - for instance, the UK - and never have had in their entire history).
Free speech is a fabrication of idealism that doesn't actually work in real life. In its absence, we have to fall back on the law and common sense. Was what he did illegal? Only if it could be reasonably be construed to be a threat. This says that it couldn't. Was what he did stupid? Not particularly. No worse than I hear a thousand times a day or heard from my own mother (seriously, what's the difference between his tweet and someone saying "If another person pulls the plug out of that server, I'm going to boil them in acid?").
10 years ago, nobody would have even cared. And today, he was proved innocent on all counts. That kinda means that nobody SHOULD have cared at all. The problem here is not the legal definition, or irresponsible behaviour - it's a prosecution service that ever thought such a petty thing could be the basis of a case in the first place.
My opinion from across the pond agrees.
Technically, there's nothing wrong or even specifically English about the sentence and the object is perfectly well specified. You just have to read it properly, that's all.
It's not 100% perfectly clear and is worded slightly oddly, but the context is enough to clarify, I would think. And lots of things are worded oddly when you "speak properly" or work in law.
Complain about anything you want in a free society.
But the concept of freedom of speech does NOT apply to:
1. talk about killing someone specifically
2. talk about blowing something up specifically
You appear to have been misinformed. Providing one does not incite imminent lawless action, it is perfectly legal under the First Amendment to advocate killing a specific person or blowing up a specific building, as a result of Brandenburg v. Ohio.
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
"Only if you put limits on it."
no, the limits are natural. people like to whine about government taking away their rights, and in many cases the government is hurting rights for bad or no good reasons. but there are also people who whine about limits on their rights who are just idiots who don't understand where their "freedoms" impact others: my freedom to drive drunk, my freedom to blast my music at 3 am, my freedom to have an unchained dog run at you on the road, etc.
there's that famous quote: "Your Liberty To Swing Your Fist Ends Just Where My Nose Begins"
and what it means is your rights and freedoms naturally exist in tension with other people's rights and freedoms
so no, you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theatre because... fascist controlling government WHARGARBBBLLL...
no, because you might cause someone else's death or injury in panic
NATURAL limits on your freedoms
this is the difference between understanding freedom as a teenager understands it (freedom from responsibility) and understanding freedom as an adult understands it (freedom and responsibility)
this is not denigrate chronological teenagers: plenty of teenagers have a well-developed sense of morality on the subject, and plenty of chronological adults are immature irresponsible assholes: mental teenagers
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I think, as a test of the freedom of speech, this person should now receive death threats for the rest of his life. As a joke. For fun.
So you've just used a public electronic communications network to send a message calling for someone to receive death threats for the rest of his life. That could be considered a message "of an indecent, obscene or menacing character". Sounds like an arguable case for a prosecution under s127 of the Communications Act 2003; the same law this guy was originally convicted under.
Fortunately, today's ruling means you're probably fine, but it is something worth bearing in mind next time you incite death threats.
Or were you merely joking?
Wait, there's a "Robin Hood Airport"? And we can't even get an "Elvis Presley International Airport" and he was a real guy.
It's usual to only name buildings after people who are dead.
Are you fucking kidding me? The Prevention of Terrorism Act was rewritten twice by Thatcher's government and was renewed every single year regardless of who was in power. The Tories nailed their colours to the mast as the party to vote for if you wanted to get tough on crime and tough on terrorism. They were the most totalitarian of the lot.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I'm British. We don't *NEED* to specify freedom of speech in the same manner. It's an inherent privilege.
We don't have, nor need, a right to bear arms. We haven't had in hundreds of years. We don't need a specification of religious freedom, we have it already.
And nobody in the UK pays a tax to watch television. They pay a fee to own a television capable of live reception and display of TV signals - which funds the BBC directly, one of the world's most renowned broadcasters, let alone public service broadcasters. We also have hardly any toll roads, a free healthcare service, and a press which has only the other year fought the political and legal system to ensure freedom of speech was preserved above all else (see "super injunctions"). By comparison a minor "luxury tax" on owning a TV is a drop in the ocean. In the same way, I could distil your entire country into a bunch of people who don't care that the poor die of simple illnesses they can't afford to have treated. I know which I'd rather have.
And this article is about that same British freedom of speech overriding the law WITHOUT THAT RIGHT NEEDING TO BE STATED - because it's so inherent in the legal system and culture that we don't need to. And it has also made news BECAUSE nobody believed it had got so far under UK law (because it was meritless from day one).
And never, in the entire world, have I seen an entire country so scared of calling someone a dickhead live on TV as the American people. You can't, because they'll sue your arse off for doing so. Your libel laws actually do the opposite of what you claim. Like the stereotypical American, you have no concept of how "unfree" you actually are and wish to point fingers at other countries and say "that's wrong" when you suffer worse every day yourself.
You have to pick your example from the 1800's, for someone that nobody has ever heard of, because all the more recent examples work against your theory and you an only state one-off. The guy you mention was himself sentenced to be horsewhipped a few years after - hardly a "modern" case.
My country is far from perfect. Read my comment history, I'm the first to admit it. The difference is that I know it.
P.S. How's that imprisoning-"suspected"-terrorists-for-10+-years-without-trial-or-appeal-in-lands-foreign-to-them-and-including-public-proof-of-torture-techniques coming along? You still have NO idea how to behave as a civilisation - those people could well be random innocent foreigners and neither your country nor your president give a shit. Don't lecture me on freedom.