Thursday, September 29, 2011

Keeping on the right side of the law

The Times was just one of many media outlets which reported the outrageous case of the teenager who sent to jail for two months only two hours after committing the heinous offence of taking a picture of his mate on his mobile.

The judge, who was presiding over the court in which this offence took place & where the mate was on trial, had obviously overreacted.

Worse, the teenager did not even get a chance to go back to his flat & make arrangements for someone to look after his new puppy.

And, as The Times photo which illustrated the article made helpfully clear, the judge was a) a woman and b) black, so it’s not just middle aged middle class white public school men who are fuddy duddy enough not to understand that using your mobile to take a picture is just what teenagers do these days - something to be applauded when they do it to defy & expose oppressive authority in countries with really tyrannical regimes.

Well, thanks to The Magistrate’s Blog giving me a steer to a piece by David Allen Green of the New Statesman, I now know that there was more to it than that. The teenager had been being disruptive throughout the proceedings.

He had even taken a photo of the victim of the crime, something the media, on another day, might have decided was the real story here.

We are used to this kind of thing from the media: the man who was given a massive fine just for disposing of his junk mail in a street litter bin? The junk mail was what allowed the authorities to trace who had been stuffing the litter bin with black plastic binbags full of miscellaneous & smelly household waste.

The Times however rather prides itself on its coverage of the law, with a respected series of Law Reports & a weekly special supplement. In this case not only did they fall for the tabloid interpretation of the case, they even, (according to David Allen Green) got their legal facts wrong.

Perhaps today’s Law supplement will put matters right.

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