Court rulings...

[BTGBullseye]

This is for discussing significant court rulings...

 

Here's a starting point. (beware, graphic language)

 

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[Selous Templar]

"There will be no justice in this country until you can swing a judge from a tree" - Anonymous.

 

To continue:

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[Templar Knight]

The Scottish Court ruling regarding Count Dankula was completely ridiculous.

 

For multiple reasons.

 

First off, I don't understand why the hell it took them so damn long just to reach a verdict. Its a fairly cut and dry situation legally. The situation did not involve any potential type of offensive abuse against any specific individual besides Markus' girlfriend and she wasn't the subject of the Prosecution so it wasn't like some mass sexual assault case where they had 300 witnesses to go through, and the content in question was a singular video that isn't even that long. What the hell was there to drag this out for pretty much as long as he'd serve a sentence for if convicted? Regardless, it made me basically realize that Scotland or the UK must not have any laws regarding Court lengths, over here in Canada, you actually cannot drag a case on forever because the laws grant the accused double the amount of time spent in court deliberations taken off of their sentences specifically to avoid these kinds of situations where an accused can spend years in court proceedings for no good reason. I thought it was a complete joke that the Crown Prosecutor was essentially allowed to turn the whole thing into a stage performance that ran way longer than it had any reason to do so, just because they wanted a fucking show trial.

 

Second was the idea that "context does not matter" or that "context is decided upon by the court", while not necessarily untrue in principle in that courts ultimately decide what the truth of the situation is, I find it an extremely odd situation wherein a Court can literally just choose to ignore a person's profession or life if they so choose merely to say "No, this is obviously a crime, irrespective of circumstance" when the reality is that this is not the case. Comedians, many of them British or are available to be viewed in Britain, have been making Nazi-related jokes, spoofs, satires, imitations for mockery, or otherwise some variety of comedic routine for decades. Arguably ever since the Second World War, I'd wager, if one were to go back that far. Like in America, the fact that the Three Stooges during wartime had Moe dress up as Hitler and Larry and Curly dress up as other Nazi figures or even more offensive Japanese portrayals as part of their routines was a common thing then for war time positive propaganda purposes, they were not idolizing these figures, they were mocking them. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that Britain had equivalents of their own. No, context does matter when it comes to comedy. A fair number of comedians have actually spoken in favour of Dankula during the proceedings, saying how its a bad precedent to punish him over what was joke.

 

Its all the more odd when Dankula has no prior history of any kind of incident where he was inciting hatred for any particular group, nor do his former political leanings or current ones lend themselves towards the narrative the prosecution was spinning as to WHO they claimed he was acting on behalf of, or trying to stir up.

 

But nope, context doesn't matter, apparently, and now you cannot make jokes in the UK because the Government and its courts might arbitrarily decide that context does not matter in any situation it so chooses, and that you're breaking the law because they simply decide to ignore the fact that you said something as a joke, or for whatever reason you may have had. Doesn't matter the intent, apparently, they decide it all for you. Not only that, but you might also serve jail time for it!

 

Totally ludicrous precedent in regards to speech laws. They've basically given carte blanche for the courts to ignore context on any matter it so deems to be considered offensive at any point in time.

[dashofweak]

The UK government seems to be pretty heavy handed with their obscenity laws, like the one time this guy got put on trial for a porno of "bestiality and genital mutilation"

 

But he was released when the "tiger" that someone was having sex with spoke (because it was actually just a guy in a suit) and the "genital mutilation" turned out to be hot dogs and ketchup.

 

http://www.keepcalmtalklaw.co.uk/the-state-of-extreme-pornography-law-in-the-uk/