Tag Archive for 'crime'

Lori Drew & cyberbullying: sometimes justice means freeing the unspeakable

The Judge, George Wu, pre­sid­ing over the sen­tenc­ing of Lori Drew declared that she had to be exon­er­ated of bul­ly­ing a 13 year old girl to death. Drew, 50 years old, allegedly in revenge for the bul­ly­ing of her own daugh­ter by the vic­tim, cre­ated a fake 16 year old male iden­tity to seduce Megan Meier. Hav­ing struck up a rela­tion­ship the girl was even­tu­ally told by the ‘boy’ that the world would be bet­ter off if she was dead. She com­mit­ted suicide.

Ghastly, ghastly, wicked behav­iour. Even if Drew never intended Meier to com­mit sui­cide she deserves the strongest social oppro­brium. But does she deserve jail? Most peo­ple, includ­ing Geeklawyer, would say ‘yes’. Unfor­tu­nately nei­ther Mis­souri nor Cal­i­for­nia had (have?) cyber bul­ly­ing leg­is­la­tion and the only way to throw meat to the media was to engage in some cre­ative crim­i­nal law the­o­riz­ing. This is where the law of unin­tended con­se­quences starts to kick in.

Cal­i­for­nia pros­e­cu­tors hit on the idea that by break­ing the terms and con­di­tions of the MySpace web­site she had, apart from any breach of civil law, com­mit­ted a felony com­puter mis­use offence. Drew was con­victed by a jury.

At this point alarm bells started to ring: did every­one who pro­vided inac­cu­rate details to MySpace, or Twitter/Facebook etc etc, thereby com­mit an impris­on­able offence? If so then many of us who use the Inter­net will have com­mit­ted such an offence and Judge Wu, one imag­ines reluc­tantly, felt com­pelled to throw the case out.

Hard cases make bad law. And some­times the ‘guilty’ do need to go free for jus­tice to survive.

It would never do to jail Geeklawyer just because he described him­self as “lov­ing and com­pas­sion­ate” on a dat­ing website.

Just say ‘No, fuck you very much’ to Terrorbollocks

If you are one of those weirdos who thinks it’s OK to inter some­one for a long period on no real evi­dence other than “he looks dubi­ous’, with­out mean­ing­ful judi­cial over­sight, all because some­one pushed the ‘Fight Ter­ror­ism’ but­ton and waved a Union Jack flag, then you can look away right now.

Good, they’ve gone.

The gov­ern­ment has had a long run­ning phoney cam­paign for 90/42 day arbi­trary deten­tion for Peo­ple Who Might Be Bad — We Don’t Know For Sure that has turned into polit­i­cal machismo. No-one else wants it: sen­si­ble cops don’t, the secu­rity ser­vices don’t but a weak gov­ern­ment thinks that it will make them look good to the elec­torate. Votes from Panic, in other words.

It’s bull­shit. Amnesty Inter­na­tional have cre­ated a peti­tion, sign it.

Ah, it feels good to use the civil lib­er­ties tag again…

Germany says: “respect data protection laws.” “Ours, we mean, not yours.”

Ger­man Data Pro­tec­tion offi­cials are launch­ing a crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion into the ille­gal sale of per­sonal data. Appar­ently call cen­tres & lot­tery firms may have sold the data on the Inter­net. The data included bank details and per­sonal infor­ma­tion. All appalling obviously.

But. For the sec­ond time this week Geeklawyer gets to say IRONIC. It was only a month or so ago that Ger­man offi­cials were defend­ing break­ing the data pro­tec­tion laws of Licht­en­stein to get bank details on sus­pected tax evaders.

Lead exposure linked to criminality?

The human body is a bizarre mix of com­plex sys­tems. Who’d have thought lead in the blood would be linked to crim­i­nal­ity? Good news is that global lead pol­lu­tion is dropping.

The bad news that some lead in the blood pol­lu­tion is def­i­nitely still a crime issue.

The law of intended consequences?

Geeklawyer was a tri­fle amused by the story of an accused being able to retain £14million fol­low­ing a botched civil seizure action by the gov­ern­ment. As out­lined here the gov­ern­ment lost a case because it wouldn’t pay bar­ris­ters a proper rate. No bar­ris­ter would accept the defen­dants brief so he had to defend him­self while the state had an army of lawyers. The judge said this was an abuse of process. No fuck­ing shit Sher­lock: reverse the bur­den of proof deprive the accused of the means of defend­ing himself.

The gov­ern­ments rob­bery scheme seems to have been under­mined by the own par­si­mony. Idiots.

Geeklawyer visits the bottom end of the profession & nearly destroys a large criminal trial

Ruthie was, as many were aware, recently pre­tend­ing to be junior coun­sel in a multi-million pound crim­i­nal trial that Geeklawyer vis­ited as it was draw­ing to its inevitable con­clu­sion. In fact it nearly drew to a con­clu­sion more rapidly as a result of Geeklawyer’s friendly visit.

Geeklawyer had merely intended to show up, pro­vide Ruthie with moral sup­port, din­ner and some post-prandial ‘enter­tain­ment’ for a cou­ple of hours while her Leader’s atten­tion was off in another part of the country.

Dis­ap­point­ingly Geeklawyer did not get to hear the slut­tily voiced Ruthie pro­vide each and every mem­ber of the jury with remote oral sex from across the court­room. Her leader was at fault: a thor­oughly charm­ing old school bar­ris­ter, he insisted on using her for the jobs for which junior female coun­sel are con­di­tioned by nature; fetch­ing cof­fee cook­ing and iron­ing shirts. That is to say, a wife: but one to whom one need not give over 50% of one’s assets at the end of the trial/marriage.

It tran­spired how­ever that the grace­ful and sup­ple Geeklawyer’s dark pres­ence caused pan­de­mo­nium to Ruthie’s client. Not pan­de­mo­nium of the usual heart, pit­ter pat­ter, vari­ety. No. Appar­ently Geeklawyer bore an uncanny resem­blance to one of the defen­dants. When Geeklawyer turned up at court and sat at the back of the pub­lic area he was unaware of the tur­bu­lence he caused.

Why, said “impres­sive client”, is junior coun­sel ‘canoodling’ with a defen­dant. Prob­lem­atic? Err yea, just a bit. impres­sive client took a bit of con­vinc­ing that noth­ing unto­ward was occurring.

Regret­tably there was worse. Much much worse.

One of the key defen­dants in the trial was an alarm­ing look­ing gen­tle­man with a ner­vous tick and a rep­u­ta­tion for, unproven, extreme vio­lence due to a well known untreat­able psy­chi­atric dis­or­der. He spent much of the day, accord­ing to watch­ful observers, pac­ing up and down eying Geeklawyer, when they were both in the court cor­ri­dors, or glar­ing at him as he sat in the pub­lic area of the trial room. This was all mis­in­ter­preted by your author.

The assump­tion was that Mr Loony­toons believed that Geeklawyer was not a respectable, indeed glam­orous com­pared to his crim­i­nal col­leagues, bar­ris­ter but a defen­dant engaged in sur­veil­lance to unknown and (for Mr Psy­cho) detri­men­tal ends.

Geeklawyer is, of course, well known for being brighter than the entire pop­u­la­tion of the planet Mensa put together. Read­ers might thus ask “OK, why did you not spot all of this?”. The prob­lem is that Geeklawyer’s ego is not that small. He had spot­ted the obser­va­tion but the truth is that, while straight, he knows how very hot he is to gay guys as well as the ladies; and, well, you know, he just assumed that gay lust rather than a psy­chotic killing instinct was the basis for the attention .…

For­tu­nately for the psy­cho hard­man he wasn’t brave or stu­pid enough to try it on with Geeklawyer. Geeklawyer is known not just for his charm and wit but also his steel hard edge: he’d would have hated to have to deprive the court of its oppor­tu­nity to mete out justice.

Gay Royal blackmail victim wont go into the witness box …

Which was not his atti­tude to his manservant’s ‘box’.

Geeklawyer has cov­ered the story before. It seems that this is the first time in a cen­tury that a Royal has been black­mailed (though of course if it were suc­cess­ful how would one know?) Obvi­ously it can’t be true because the vic­tim is a mar­ried Royal with chil­dren; and any­way there can only be one Queen in the Royal Family.

It did seem a bit odd to Geeklawyer not to have the vic­tim on the stand — one imag­ines that that would sig­nif­i­cantly dam­age the prospects of the accused being con­victed. Still even if the pros­e­cu­tion can’t make a case per­haps the vic­tim can? But he would need expert wood­work­ing skills (please don’t use that as a clue to try and hunt down the iden­tity of the royal involved ;) )

Nothing changes

Twatty gov­ern­ment min­is­ter are prone to say­ing that we are fac­ing new types of [some­thing dangerous/annoying] in soci­ety that needs leg­is­lat­ing against to pro­tect the pub­lic, or actu­ally to appease Daily Mail read­ers. Hood­ies are a clas­sic exam­ple but Pro­fes­sor Robert Bartlett has done research and found that gangs of law­less binge drink­ing hooded yoofs were widely per­ceived as a problem

Prosecutor tripped by unexpected court argument

The Sun reports that a trial in Read­ing descended into anar­chy when the defen­dant, a pikey accused of a shoot­ing, leapt from the dock and made a suc­cess­ful dash for free­dom. In the process he bit a cop’s nose. He seems to have been helped by a friends who were waiting.

The funny bit that caught Geeklawyer’s eye was that the pros­e­cut­ing bar­ris­ter Ian Hope tried to be a hero. He threw off his wig and gown and gave chase. It could have ended so well but one of McInerney’s accom­plices tripped him up as he ran.

Mr Hope will now be rue­ing the fact that he didn’t pre­pare well enough for his case.

Police are stop­ping all pony and traps in the area.

Scientology and DDos attacks

Broadly Geeklawyer would say that Denial of Ser­vice Attacks were, and should be, crim­i­nal offences.

Ah yes, you say, a ‘but’ is in the air;

There has been a recent sus­tained attempt to remove this evil quack religion/business/multi-level-marketing-scam from the Inter­net by online vig­i­lantes who are engaged in DDos attacks.

Fuck­ing good job too. Sci­en­tol­ogy is the scummy scam prod­uct of the fraud­ster Ron L. Hub­bard who con­fessed to a friend that cre­at­ing one’s own reli­gion was a great way to make a for­tune. Geeklawyer would not, of course, encour­age assist aid or incite the com­mis­sion of any offence, except the mur­der of Tony Blair, but he remains sup­port­ive of their objec­tives. If they wish dogged vicious intractable and deter­mined pro-bono legal aid in the event of their cap­ture then they may have Geeklawyer’s ser­vices gratis.

On a side note, Tom ‘Loony Laugh’ Cruise has recently been widely mocked for his embar­rass­ing weird video that he has been try­ing to remove from the Inter­net because it demon­strates that not only is he a shit actor (Did you see “War of the Worlds”?) but a loony recruit­ment whacko for his pet cult. And he is, of course, not even slightly a closet homosexual.



 

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