2013/12/1 Alexandros Papadopoulos <[email protected]> > > We're already there methinks - remember that unpleasantness about a > bunch of people (including an academic) being thrown in jail for 24hrs > because *they were going to* stage a mock zombie-royal-wedding gathering > in central London on the day of the royal wedding? > > It's not just pre-crime, it's pre-lawful-criticism detention and > suppression. > > Can't find a succinct account of the events of that day - if anyone has > a link that provides a summary of facts please share. >
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/apr/28/royal-wedding-protest-three-arrested seems as good a summary as I can find (but not really good enough). Here two elements of English law interact. First, we have "inchoate" offences - varieties of "pre-crime" in your terminology. They all require something more than simply being someone who is going to commit a crime: - attempt requires an act that is "more than merely preparatory" (so you have to have gone some way towards committing the offence) - incitement (at common law - now replaced by the offences of encouraging in Part 2 of the Serious Crime Act 2007 - under which the various facebook riot offences were prosecuted) - there had to be at least 2 people involved and the defendant had to be "inciting" the other to commit an offence - conspiracy requires more than one person working together for a common aim So, all of them have some threshold that prevents them from being used for pure thought crimes or for people likely to commit offences, but "conspiracy" is particularly useful to the police where several people are involved. The second element are two old favourites: (i) "public nuisance" is an offence, but it is a fairly slippery and ill defined offence useful if you want to arrest people who might be trouble-makers (s127 of the Communications Act 2003 has the same flavour); (ii) "breach of the peace" which is also a highly flexible context deployable to excuse police action in many different situations.It isn't an offence, but you can arrest someone for it (or to prevent it) which means that it can be as misused as if it was. These two things are really old problems, dating way back into the common law. Broader powers of arrest are much newer and thrown into the mix just make things worse. Moral: don't vote for governments who support this kind of thing. Francis -- Francis Davey
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