Twitter Joke Trial: Appeal Lost

Once upon a time Paul Chambers made a flippant joke on Twitter. Then he was convicted of ‘menace’ for it:

Paul Chambers, the Twitter “bomb hoax” guy, was found guilty on Monday of sending a menacing message on Twitter and fined approximately £1000. This was his first criminal offence. I wrote about this in an earlier entry as I was preparing a letter of complaint to the South Yorkshire CPS. My complaint failed to deter the CPS from pursuing their charge under section 127(1) of the Communications Act 2003. It did however contribute to the defendant’s decision to seek to have his initial guilty plea vacated. This was successful, to the surprise and renewed hope of many. Our hopes were dashed when district court judge Jonathan Bennett delivered his guilty verdict, which legal blogger Jack-of-Kent has described as a disgraceful and illiberal judgement.

Yesterday Paul lost his appeal:

The man convicted of “menace” for threatening to blow up an airport in a Twitter joke has lost his appeal.

Paul Chambers, a 27-year-old accountant whose online courtship with another user of the microblogging site led to the “foolish prank”, had hoped that a crown court would dismiss his conviction and £1,000 fine without a full hearing.

But Judge Jacqueline Davies instead handed down a devastating finding at Doncaster which dismissed Chambers’s appeal on every count. After reading out his comment from the site – “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” – she found that it contained menace and Chambers must have known that it might be taken seriously.

He was also saddled with a legal bill three times higher than his original £384 with £600 costs, as the court ordered him to pay a further £2,000 legal bill for the latest proceedings.

The appeal judge ruled:

“The words in the message speak for themselves and they were sent at a time when the security threat to this country was substantial.”

Some responses on Twitter itself:

David Allen Green (his lawyer): I wish I’d never used words ‘misconceived’ and ‘illiberal’ before now, so I could use them for first time for#TwitterJokeTrial judgment.

Dara O’Briain So that’s the banning of sarcasm, irony, sub-text and any of the other subtleties of language that we use AS GROWN-UPS.

David Schneider All we need now is Gareth Compton telling us to stone the #twitterjoketrial judge and the Law and Twitter will implode.

Armando Iannucci The jury at #twitterjoketrial need to be sh…Oh, hang on, there’s someone at the door.

Dr Evan Harris I would feel differently if it wasn’t a joke & if it had any chance of causing the act allegedly incited.

David Mitchell A disgrace. He’s being punished for flippancy.

The blogosphere has reacted similarly. Heresy Corner adds:

This is not about modern technology, but about the new threat to deep-seated English habits of mind. What has changed is officialdom’s loss of a sense of proportion, or of their ability to use discretion and common-sense. That represents a more radical change than the coming of Internet. And the police, the CPS and the judges are on the leading edge of it. The old-fashioned traditionalist who doesn’t get it is Paul Chambers, doing what comes naturally to almost any English person and finding himself in the kind of situation once described so eloquently by Kafka. Who wasn’t English at all.

Twitter may have made Chambers’ witticism accessible to a member of staff dredging the search facility for mentions of Robin Hood Airport. Without Twitter, his joke would never have become public. But the medium is just that – a medium. What the police, the prosecutors and the judges didn’t get is the joke. Except that, being English themselves, they almost certainly did. That’s what makes this whole saga so tragic.

I’m not sure what else I have to add. As with the Compton case I blogged about yesterday – he made an ill advised but harmless joke, and has a criminal record for it, with all the damage that will do (and has done) to his reputation, ability to travel, emigrate and gain future employment. If you agree with me that this shocking attack on free speech needs to be reversed, you can donate to Paul’s legal defence fund here.