Secular Café: Man gets community sentence for Facebook post about dead soldiers

Secular Café For serious discussion of politics, political news, policy, political theory and economics and events happening round the world

Man gets community sentence for Facebook post about dead soldiers Oct 9th 2012, 12:22 Quote: A man who posted a Facebook message following the deaths of six British soldiers which said: "All soldiers should die and go to hell" has been sentenced to a community order and told to pay costs of £300 by magistrates. Azhar Ahmed, 20, from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, admitted posting the message two days after the deaths of the soldiers in March this year but told a trial at Huddersfield magistrates court last month that he did not think it was offensive. The remarks were derogatory, disrespectful and inflammatory, the court ruled last month as a district judge found him guilty of a grossly offensive communication. --snip--- At the trial in September, District Judge Jane Goodwin said the law was not there to stop legitimate political opinion being strongly voiced. But she said the test was whether what had been written was "beyond the pale of what is tolerable in our society". She said Ahmed's post cleared this hurdle and she was satisfied that the message was grossly offensive. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/oc...-dead-soldiers It was reported that if the guy was older he would have gone to prison. This doesn't sit well with me. Quote: Should Matthew Woods have been sentenced to 12 weeks in prison for making "grossly offensive" remarks about the missing five-year-old girl April Jones on his Facebook page? While Woods, 19, was pleading guilty to the offence in Chorley magistrates' court on Monday -- and while Mark Bridger, 46, was appearing before Aberystwyth magistrates charged with April's murder -- the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, was sitting round a table with a group of journalists discussing whether people like Woods should face charges in the first place. Starmer made it clear that he had to enforce the law as it was; he couldn't grant immunities. On the other hand, the Crown Prosecution Service, which he heads, couldn't prosecute everyone who sent an offensive tweet or email. So the DPP is in the process of drawing up draft guidelines, which he hopes to circulate for public comment next month. http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2012/o...omments-prison Is there a pattern forming here? So what do you think the limits of freedom of speech should be on the internet?

You are receiving this email because you subscribed to this feed at blogtrottr.com. If you no longer wish to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe from this feed, or manage all your subscriptions