Remember Paul Chambers, the poor sod tried and convicted for making a joke on Twitter? (See previous posts here.) Well, he lost his appeal this afternoon:
Paul Chambers, a 27-year-old accountant whose online courtship with another tweeter 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’ appeal on every count. After reading out his Tweet – “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 it contained menace and that Chambers must have known that it might be taken seriously.
[…] Judge Davies told the court that definitions of menace included “a great inconvenience” and drew on previous case law to uphold Chambers’s conviction by Doncaster magistrates.
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