Category Archives: Law

A private police service is mounting the UK’s first private prosecutions for theft and other “minor” crimes because it claims the police have “given up” taking them to court.

Wasn’t there a time when all prosecutions were private?

Maybe that was before the UK though….

Asailor who was facing up to two years in jail for being drunk in command of a supertanker has been unable to be sentenced because immigration officials will not let him back into the country due to his conviction.

Ukrainian, Valeriy Velychko, admitted being six times over the legal limit for alcohol when he appeared at Teesside magistrates’ court in the summer.

He also pleaded guilty to obstructing a police officer who was trying to remove him from the gigantic 23,600 tonne tanker Kohl 1 at Teesport in July.

But the 53-year-old tanker captain was given bail by magistrates and allowed to return home with his lawyers assuring the bench he would come back to Britain for his sentencing hearing.

However, on the two occasions he tried to re-enter the UK, to attend court, he was turned back by immigration officials because of his criminal record.

Me, I’d argue that the State has stopped him fulfilling his side of the bargain. Up to the State to sort it out. They can send a bloke around with the visa, they can meet him at the airport to usher him though, whatever. But sod ’em, their screw up, not his.

Top City lawyers advising Thomas Cook on its failed rescue plan are said to have demanded weekly payments from the travel company to ensure they received their fees in the run-up to its collapse into insolvency.

The move spared insolvency experts at elite “Magic Circle” law firm Slaughter and May and US firm Latham & Watkins from joining a long queue of creditors when the company went down – including the company’s 21,000 staff, who face a long wait for their final pay cheque.

Also fairly normal I would have thought for both beancounters and shysters to ask the same of a company they’re trying to save from bankruptcy….

Disputes will be settled in a court of arbitration, where major corporations maintain the right to sue governments that make unilateral changes to the law that affect their profits. This is a mechanism tobacco companies have used to extract compensation for laws restricting or banning smoking.

There have definitely been ISDS cases brought by tobacco companies over restrictions. Think Philip Morris sued Australia over advertising bans, or plan packets, something like that?

They also lost, big time. Which becomes the question. Suits have definitely been filed. But have the ‘baccy companies won any of them?

The last time the US federal government limited gun ownership was 25 years ago

As is obvious the limitations aren’t working. Thus gun control doesn’t work, right?

US to resume executions of federal death row inmates after 16 years

They’ve been standing on the trapdoor – or strapped to the gurney? – all this time?

Just can’t get the staff these days…..

AC Grayling has won £20,000 libel damages against a Twitter user who accused him of being a paedophile in a case he said should act as a “marker” against irresponsible social media users.

The 69-year-old philosopher and Oxford University fellow was “distressed and enraged” after Peter North suggested he possessed videos showing child abuse in a tweet posted online in May last year.

The defamatory tweet read: “I’d bet good money that AC Grayling has a hard drive full of under age botty sex videos.”

Professor Grayling was alerted to the post by other Twitter users and said he felt so insulted that he was unable to ignore it as he launched legal action, the High Court heard.

North, who failed to file a defence,

I’d have at least tried the defence of mere common abuse….

Harriet Wistrich, Mrs Challen’s lawyer, said there were “many more cases” of women whose years of abuse by their partners would merit a reassessment of their convictions. One has already been given leave to appeal.

“How many have been convicted for murder where they’ve killed someone abusing them?” said Ms Wistrich. “There are probably dozens of them.”

If we relax these standards then we must do so in a decidedly non-gendered manner, no?

How many men are serving murder sentences for having killed nagging wives? Or perhaps a little stronger – but our definition of domestic abuse is gender equal now, isn’t it?

A police force has been found guilty of discrimination after it refused to give a potential recruit a job because he was a white heterosexual man.

Cheshire Police are believed to be the first organisation in the UK to be found guilty of using positive action to discriminate by deciding to shun 25-year-old Matthew Furlong in 2017.

The force rejected him while in the midst of a diversity drive after a report found in 2015 it was one of only four constabularies to have no black officers.

For there will be massive street protests over this display of institutional racism, won’t there?

Moyo’s attorney, Kagiso Jani is demanding his client be discharged and acquitted.

Jani was left a frustrated man after the case, which was set for trial for Monday and Tuesday, had to be postponed as the State did not bring any witnesses and thus were not ready to continue.

“The State think the court will rubber stamp whatever it says. And it does not care about the welfare of the accused person. He is not able to see his wife and this attitude of the State will affect his marriage because as a married man he must have sex with his wife!” fired Jani.

Anyone asked the wife?

Sen. Cory Booker made himself look the fool yet again this week while questioning judicial nominee Neomi Rao.

At Tuesday’s confirmation hearing, the Jersey Democrat senator went after Rao with the clear suspicion that she’s some kind of religious bigot, asking first: “Have you ever had an LGBTQ law clerk?”

Her reply exposed Booker’s total lack of preparation: “I have not been a judge, so I don’t have any law clerks.”

Be careful here – we’re not in Scotland but still, contempt of court and all that.

Still, interesting choice of words:

Alex Salmond has said he was “innocent of any criminality”

No comments, see top line.

A Labour MP could face a parliamentary inquiry for using House of Commons notepaper to plead with a judge not to jail her “beautiful son” for serious drug offences.

Kate Osamor stated her position at the time on Jeremy Corbyn’s front bench when she wrote to the judge who spared her son a jail term in October for possessing drugs including cocaine and ecstasy with intent to supply.

Her letter was released yesterday after the judge agreed with an application by The Times and other newspapers, which argued that the public interest demanded transparency in the sentencing process.

“Don’t you know who I am” not being one of those things we Brits really take to….

David Beckham ‘shirking responsibility as role model’ after dodging speeding conviction on technicality

The State has awesome power to prosecute. To entirely fuck up lives by doing so. Thus there are limitations pm how and when it may do so. Important stuff like producing evidence and so on. And you can think that getting the letters out on time as being unimportant but it’s not, it’s all part of that same limitation on what they may do to us.

Despite accepting driving the car at that speed, he will not face action because a notice of intended prosecution (NIP) was not received until one day after the statutory 14-day time limit.

And how about that Curajus State that can’t send letters?

Blackpool activists jailed for anti-fracking protest
Three protesters given prison sentences for blocking Cuadrilla lorry convoy

No, not really.

Three environmental activists are believed to be the first people to receive jail sentences for an anti-fracking protest in the UK.

Nope, all of that is their own justification for what they’ve done. What they’ve been jailed or is something different:

Simon Roscoe Blevins, 26, and Richard Roberts, 36, were given 16 months in prison and Richard Loizou, 31, got 15 months on Wednesday after being convicted of causing a public nuisance by a jury at Preston crown court in August. Another defendant, Julian Brock, 47, was given a 12-month suspended sentence after pleading guilty to the same offence.

They’ve been jailed for causing a public nuisance.

Their justification of it being something the jury didn’t find to be a justification. Yes, yes, we don’t have jury nullification in England, they decide purely and only on points of law and fact. And here’s the bridge in Brooklyn I’ve for sale…..by the way, on Tuesday, the Guardian was telling us that conviction rates of young men for the crime of rape were low because juries didn’t like to convict young men with their lives ahead of them. No no, we’ve not got jury nullification at all.

But a senior staffer for a Republican on the judiciary committee told the Guardian that as long as Kavanaugh categorically denies the allegation, there is no way to overcome the “innocent until proven guilty” threshold and justify altering the vote.

The source acknowledged that adding a name and a face changed the calculus to a degree but said a number of Republicans feel there is not enough to investigate, with the accuser understandably forgetting details and with no corroborating witnesses.

Well, no, here is a witness, the third person in the room.

According to her account, she escaped when Kavanaugh’s Georgetown Preparatory School friend, Mark Judge, jumped on top of them, “sending all three tumbling”. She said she ran, locked herself in a bathroom, then fled the house.
…
Judge told the Weekly Standard he had “no recollection of any of the events described in today’s Post article or attributed to her letter”.

But who does it corroborate?

Procter & Gamble, the household products company, has applied to trademark acronyms common in textspeak including “LOL” and “WTF”.

If successful, the terms could be used to market products such as soap, detergents and air fresheners in order to attract younger consumers.

P&G registered the trademark applications with the US Patent and Trademark Office in April. The newly branded products would be sold alongside well known items such as Febreze, Fairy and Mr Clean.

Alongside LOL (laughing out loud) and WTF (what the fuck), other acronyms P&G has applied to trademark are NBD (no big deal) and FML (fuck my life).

The company’s applications have not yet been approved. According to Ad Age, the trademark office has requested clarification regarding the applications and P&G has until January to respond.

That “If” in “If successful.”

Not a hope in hell it will be.

Trademarks aren’t a first come, first served, you get to collect any interesting looking phrase. There’s got to be some connection with the product, even some origination story. As with patents, something that’s already in common use ain’t gonna make it.

Either that or we need to take some .50 calibres and deal with the patent and trademark office.

This is a political prosecution:

Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer and right-hand-man, reportedly faces a federal investigation into possible bank and tax fraud relating to more than $20m in loans.

The New York Times reported that federal investigators in Manhattan were reaching the end of their inquiries and were “considering filing charges by the end of August”. According to the newspaper, their focus was falling on multi-million dollar loans Cohen received from two New York banks as well as on income his family gained from the city’s yellow taxi business.

Federal investigators were also homing in on Cohen’s role in arranging hush money for two women who alleged affairs with Trump before the 2016 presidential election. The pay-offs might have constituted a breach of campaign finance law, the New York Times reported.

The darkening cloud of federal prosecutorial interest amid possible imminent charges are likely to substantially crank up pressure on Cohen to co-operate with the on-going investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller. That probe is reaching a critical stage as Mueller seeks to determine whether collusion took place between the Trump campaign and Russia to sway the outcome of the 2016 election.

Whether and when to prosecute seems to be based on whether he’ll turn on Trump.

Sure, this isn’t political at all, is it?

A professor who has been an expert witness in hunting prosecutions and provided key evidence for the foxhunting ban has been accused of “manipulating” evidence in an academic row.

Prof Stephen Harris, a retired Bristol University academic, has been accused of “cherry-picking” studies, allowing him to “ignore or misrepresent the science that had been contrary to the activist agenda”.

The Crown Prosecution Service is now facing calls to review the suitability of Prof Harris as an expert witness.

Even as an expert witness you are supposed to do this you know. There’s a hell of a lot of dross published as science out there after all.

Quite what he line to cross between being properly selective and biased is, well, hmm……..

A parked car belonging to an imprisoned man cannot be moved whilst he is in jail because he has a blue badge, a council has said.

The vehicle, which is said to belong to David Marks, has been reportedly sat outside Croydon Crown Court for months after Mr Marks parked there to attend his own hearing.

Local residents have now raised questions over the car, asking why it has been allowed to take up the disabled bay for so long, despite no one using it.

But the council has confirmed it has no intentions of moving the vehicle as it parked there legally.

The Smart car has been sitting outside the court since Mr Marks, from Bromley, was jailed earlier this year.

He reportedly drove the car to court where he was sentenced for racially or religiously aggravated harassment. After being found guilty of one count and pleading guilty to a second he was jailed for 12 months on April 13.

How lovely.

And no, we don’t have exceptions. It’s legal, on your way then matey. That he’s in jail, on holiday, simply wants to leave his car where it’s legally parked? It’s legally parked and there’s an end to it.