Basically Bonkers

Ian Oakley sounds like he should have been a fairly bright, if somewhat dull, person. His picture makes him look pretty dull too. In fact he sounds like he should have been very dull:

• Went to Durham University - yep, dull, although we'll give him some credit for taking History
• Regulator at the FSA - dull to the max
• Founding Chairman of Monmouth Conservative Future - sounds dull, whatever it is
• Facebook friend of Chris Grayling, Grant Shapps and Louise Bagshawe (although his Facebook profile seems to have gone) - really big yawn
  
• Conservative candidate for Newport East in 2001 - fairly dull, managed to get ex-Tory Alan Howarth's majority for Labour under 10,000
• Councillor in Hillingdon - du.. well you get the idea
  
• Conservative parliamentary candidate for Watford

Or at least he was the Tory candidate for Watford until about two weeks ago, which is when he stops sounding quite so dull. He was arrested in connection with a campaign of harassment against Liberal Democrats in Watford and resigned as the parliamentary candidate. There's a comment on that TimesOnline article that maybe Oakley was the real victim. That suggestion doesn't look quite so clever today as Oakley pleaded guilty at St Albans Magistrates' Court to five counts of criminal damage and two of harassment. It seems that over a period of two to three years Oakley targetted his Lib Dem opponents by:

• Slashing car tyres
• Smashing lights on cars
• Making silent phone calls
• Sending poison pen letters
• Painting grafitti on an opponent's house calling him a "perv"
• Accused one of his opponents of being a child abuser

Now, do you think he learnt this kind of thing at Durham, the FSA or Conservative HQ? The Mags told Oakley that his conduct was "very, very serious indeed, so serious that custody would be an option".

Oakley has been taken off the main Conservative party website, but his entry hasn't disappeared yet - you can still find it through the cache. The Watford Conservatives site also seems to have purged any mention of Oakley, but their banner proclaims "Cleaner. Greener. Safer." and it's a good point. Keep a close eye on the perps at all times and you should be a lot safer.

Daniel Finkelstein fesses up to his part in Oakley's selection and says that there "wasn't the smallest sign that he was, well, basically bonkers."

Rumours of my demise...

... have been greatly exaggerated. Although this site hasn't seen much action for a while I have been active, for instance on Twitter. Everyone knows what Twitter is by now, but if you don't then think of it like microblogging, such as Tumblr, but more communal and immediate. It's one of those technologies that tend to all get lumped together as "social networking", but I see Twitter as sociable, not just social. While it gets compared to Facebook statuses it is clearly far more versatile than that. Have a look at Twitterapps to see some of the things that can be done with it. There's plenty more at Everything Twitter and a neat visualisation at Twitter World.

One of the advantages over a regular blog is that it somehow seems more acceptable to go off topic, because each tweet is gone soon after posting, so you get to see a different perspective on people. A while back there was a bit of a debate about people using twitterfeed to publicise their blog posts. I personally find it quite useful to see when new posts go up, but that's partly to do with how I get my RSS. An idea of what the appropriate tweetiquette is will take time to develop. I still get worried sometimes about going too far off topic. Tweetburner is useful for seeing just how interesting my links to assorted football stories are to people (answer: slightly). Tweetburner gives you a bookmarklet that allows you to post a nice short URL for any webpage and still leaves room for a comment about it. You can then see how many people follow the link, although there's no way of telling whether they actually stayed on the page for more than a second.

One problem that I have found is that it is easy to follow too many tweeters and inevitably interesting stuff gets lost in the noise. That's not the real real big issue though - instead that is whether interest will be maintained or whether it will peter out as many people's facebook usage has. The Ed Techie discussed this way back in January: Facebook - the holiday romance. The only advantage Twitter has over the many other similar services would seem to be the number of users - although sometimes this can be too much stress leading to the famous Fail Whale. Twitter is only as useful as the stuff that gets posted/tweeted/whatever.

Props to Nick Holmes at Binary Law who issued the clarion call for law bloggers to get on Twitter. His other suggestion, for subject specific news feeds, has, I think, only yielded one new feed - Housing Law from Nearly Legal. Also available are feeds for:

• Privacy
• Internet
• Copyright

Any I've missed?

I have also grabbed HRLaw to act as a feed for Human Rights stories, but as yet I haven't finished sorting the sources and putting them through pipes. If anybody has any suggestions for must-have feeds then please let me know.

The real clincher has to be the opportunity to converse with a gorilla. I wonder if he's thinking about moving to Spain. Regardless, the campaign to get Tempranillo his own website starts here and now.

That's enough about Twitter, if you're interested then you can find my tweets here.

Random thought: Is copying the Lego approach a sure fire route to winning privacy claims?

Common Sense 2 v City of London Police 0

Bystander and Geeklawyer have already covered the story of the City of London Police issuing a teenager with a summons under section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 for displaying a sign calling Scientology a "dangerous cult" during the Anonymous Project Chanology demonstrations. The teenager relied on Latey J's judgment in Re: B & G (Minors) (Custody). I can't find an authoritative copy, only this one, but the LexisNexis summary of the appeal ([1985] FLR 493) suggests that it is accurate as would appear to be this copy of the appeal judgment. The Guardian is now reporting that the CPS has rightly decided not to take this any further, hopefully putting the cops firmly back in their box, on the basis that his sign was criticism, rather than abusive, insulting or offensive. There isn't a statement from the CPS, at least not their website, but interestingly one of their most recent news items is the text of a lecture given at Birmingham University on 'Free Expression and the Rule of Law'.

Vaguely interesting fact: Mark Thomas holds the world record for the most protests by one person in one day (link 1, link 2).

Making it a doubly bad day for the City of London Police, Latham LJ and Underhill J have ruled that the warrant that they obtained to raid Harry Redknapp's home was unlawful. Bit of a bungle by the cops on this one too, as this was a really high profile raid as part of investigations into corruption in transfers of footballers. Harry Redknapp is manager of Portsmouth and his house was searched while he was out of the country by police accompanied by media coverage that Redknapp's lawyers have claimed was encouraged by them. The Police have issued a short statement in response.

Update: the Redknapp judgment is now on BAILII: [2008] EWHC 1177 (Admin)

Know Your Rights

The first in a very occasional series connecting current news stories with random other links, all set to lyrics of songs by The Clash.

This is a public service announcement ... with links

You have the right not to be killed
Murder is a crime
Unless it was done by a policeman or aristocrat
Know your rights

I was going to link to something about Thomas Cholmondeley for the 'aristocrat' bit, but that's pre-empting the outcome a bit.

Coming soon, the various measures for calculating inflation will be plotted against 'Lost in the Supermarket'.

How to Vote (Pt 2)

1. Go to polling station.
2. Collect ballot paper.
3. Go to booth.
4. Mark an 'x' next to your preferred candidate.
5. Do NOT eat the ballot paper.
6. Place ballot paper in box.

If you absolutely have to eat your ballot paper, remember you can do it with relative impunity in the comfort of your own home by requesting a postal ballot. Don't worry, somebody else will probably vote for you anyway.

Health and Social Care Bill

A spy has pointed out to me two articles in the Solicitors Journal, 'Human Rights Act extended to cover residents in private care homes' and 'Form and Function', which cover proposed amendments to the Health and Social Care Bill which will reverse the decision of the House of Lords in YL v Birmingham as far as private care homes are concerned. I wrote about this way back when, and I think that this is only part of the answer and one of the politically easier options for the Government as it avoids tackling tricky issues about the wider reach of the HRA. It's worth noting that the Department of Health press release does contained buried away in the notes to editors this little gem:

"The Government is also considering how to address the wider question of the scope of the Human Rights Act, and has undertaken to consult on this issue."

All in all, it's a step in the right direction as far as I'm concerned, but cannot be seen as the end of the road.

Not a waste of time at all

Scott Baker LJ has ruined everybody's hopes of finally getting to the bottom of what really happened to Diana, Dodi and Henri Paul by shooting down Mohamed al Fayed's claims that MI6, Prince Philip, Slobodan Milosevic and you killed them, stating that there was no evidence to suggest otherwise.

Ask yourself this though, if MI6 did kill somebody then they'd make sure that there wasn't any evidence, wouldn't they?

He also appears to have ruled out any possible participation by the lone gunman, Savo Milosevic, a Paul McCartney lookalike, Alex Krycek, Martin Bormann or New Coke.

Scott Baker LJ noted that Mike Mansfield had dialled down the crazy compared to al Fayed:

"Mohamed Al Fayed's beliefs are to be contrasted with the way in which his legal team have been approaching the matter to witnesses. Advocates are bound by professional rules of conduct which do not allow them to make allegations of serious misconduct for which there is no evidence. Those representing Mohamed Al Fayed did not suggest to a number of the key players in the alleged conspiracy that they had played the part ascribed to them over the years."

Expect some sort of intervention soon from Heather Mills as to why Part VII of the Bar Code of Conduct is all part of the system's way to defeat justice.

No word yet though from Mansfield as to whether the current form of al Fayed's Thames-side toy is simply part of an incredibly cunning long term strategy to make them the Manchester United of London.

All in all money well spent then.

How to Vote (pt 1)

Local elections are coming up in May and a few stories about voting have caught my eye over the last couple of weeks.

Taking them in chronological order, firstly the Divisional Court has held in Pilling v Reynolds [2008] EWHC 316 (QB) that a '\' next to a name on a ballot paper can be counted as a vote, even though it wasn't in the right box. This would seem to be right, to hold otherwise would be to do quite a damage to Ruffle v Rogers. When I started to write this post the case was only reported on Lawtel (full judgment Edit: I can't seem to get the darn Lawtel links to work at the mo), but thanks to my brilliant tardiness it can now also be accessed via Westlaw or LexisNexis, but not it seems via any non-subscription services (Edit: It is on BAILII, just they called it Re Burnley Local Government Election).

There has been quite a bit of coverage about Eshaq Khan, a Conservative Councillor in Slough who has been found guilty of vote rigging. At least 145 postal votes were faked, probably hundreds in total, making his 120 vote majority look a tad vulnerable. The Times has followed this up with several articles about postal voting, such as this, this, this and this leader. Richard Mawrey QC gave the judgment.

Postal voting is just one of the many concerns surrounding the Zimbabwean elections on Saturday. I have a sneaking suspicion that Mugabe might just clinch it.

It appears that Youtube has been hit by vote rigging of some sort as well, after a change at the top of it's most watched video leaderboard. Is Youtube still even going? The explanation appears to be that the video was tagged with "hot" and "sex", a throwback to the days before cats controlled the internet.

Then yesterday's Guardian carried a report on its front page about proposals to reform electoral legislation to encourage greater participation. Apparently the quite ridiculous combination of alternative or supplementary votes (not clear which) AND compulsory participation is being mooted. Ken Ritchie, Chief Executive of the Electoral Reform Society has responded to these proposals. See also the view over at Make My Vote Count. How long before somebody suggests tagging ballot papers with "hot" and "sex" to increase voter turnout? Actually, it looks like I just did. Patent pending.

Also buried within the Guardian was this report about the value of influence-peddling to MPs. The research paper, 'MPs For Sale? Estimating Returns to Office in Post-War British Politics', has been carried out by two Harvard researchers and there is a brief summary available as well. There is also a little bit of analysis about their statistical analysis.

And finally, Bhutan has become the world's newest democracy, possibly inspired by Slough.

Wikileaks

Although wikileaks.org is no longer available, there are a whole host of cover names or the ip address is still working. More at Media Law Profs and the New York Times.

I'd have called it samizdat.org, but whatever, I've got a nose bleed to attend to.

New Immigration Bill

Here, here and here, although unsurprisingly not here yet.

It's a small point, but since when have nonpayment of taxes and law breaking NOT been integral parts of British society?

Dusting off the cobwebs

Well, it's been a long time and I all I have are rather poor excuses about the combined load of work and study. Anyway, while the tumbleweed has been blowing through here (although bizarrely feedburner reports that the number of subscribers has gone up quite a bit during January - welcome you poor deluded newcomers) I have realised that I a) need to make more of an effort and b) nope, just that.

I was going to do a rather potted summary of some of the most interesting developments during the hiatus, but to be honest I'm sure that somebody somewhere has already covered everything, so I'll leave it at that for now.

This year will mark the tenth anniversaries of the Human Rights Act and devolution (Scotland Act and Government of Wales Act). More on both of these over the course of the year. I also have a new project in the pipeline which might be of interest/use for some people, which I'll write more about later.

I still haven't found what I'm looking for

While I would still like to see something that allows me to easily cross search Athens resources, I have been using a little Firefox addon for a while which is fantastically useful. Dr. Evil's 'Add to Search Bar' creates a search bar entry for pretty much any website that has a search facility. It works well with sites like BAILII and you can use it with Westlaw as well, but so far I haven't been able to get it to play with LexisNexis. A bit more tweaking perhaps.

Christmas Party Food Safety Warning

Geeklawyer has been busy robustly defending Manchester Council's brave anti-photo policy and quite rightly too. Won't somebody please think of the children? Now Mrs Publawyer has pointed out a disturbing trend by the CPS to allow youngsters to roam the country hurling party snacks at all and sundry without fear of prosecution. While some will applaud this as a victory for common sense, I can see the darker and more disturbing side. Everyone knows that cocktail sausage assaults are the cannabis of the non-fatal offences ladder. Before you know it they'll be sharpening the corners of doritos and turning them into 3-point throwing stars and bludgeoning the unsuspecting with empty coke bottles with cocktail sticks inserted.

And before my other regular reader points out that this is an old story, I would like to highlight that this story did indeed break in August, but it is only this week that the CPS have decided to discontinue the case and as I only heard about that yesterday evening I have to work with what crumbs I can.

Following on from that revelation was a discussion on youth justice on Radio 4's 'Unreliable Evidence'. Lots of complaints, but not much in the way of workable solutions. A working party is all very well and good, but any ideas, any at all, for the way forward? Someone (I think he was a magistrate, but I can't get the Listen Again function to work to check it) appeared at one point to be just a well-timed Clive Anderson intervention away from advocating all out vigilante reprisals as the way to cure the defects in the youth justice system. Marvellous. Some mention was also made of the tendency of the police to arrest and charge youngsters even in trivial cases due to their targets etc, but why do the CPS make the decision to prosecute anyway?

"It’s a free country, i'n'it?”

Excellent stuff from Baroness Hale (at 112) as the House of Lords slapped down the Countryside Alliance's latest challenge against anti-hunting legislation this week. Head of Legal has some more serious analysis, but I want to know if the Lords will be completely embracing this kind of approach and soon be texting their speeches in. Presumably this fella would completely flip out at such a development. Assuming of course that he hasn't already.

Whoops!

D'oh! Perhaps Sir Ian Blair's resignation letter has got lost in the same way. Just don't judge him on one letter ok? Equally don't judge HMRC on one lost CD ... there was two? Morons, why didn't they just use a DVD?

Anyway, if HMRC can rustle up the cash they can get the disks back through eBay and everybody can stop frantically giving their kids new birthdays so that they can change their PINs to something they can still remember - "Chantelle, CHANTELLE! Mummy can't remember when your new birthday is, go and get another new PIN from the bank and we'll get you another birthday. Hmm, how many months are there in a year anyway?"

More seriously, the whole sorry scenario is more proof, if it were needed, that big government and secure, efficient, value-for-money IT project management do not go hand in hand. Remember kids, aggravated damages are available for misuse of private information, I think we can slap something together.

More on this from Charon QC, Geeklawyer and IMPACT.

Update: eBay have pulled the listing, doubtless after HMRC turned up at their door thinking they had the CDs, but there is a copy at The Register. Of the eBay listing, not the CDs, that would be just plain crazy. And in order to improve my posting average I reserve the right to branch off into restaurant reviews.
The NAO link in my comment below should be http://www.nao.org.uk/pn/07-08/0708_child_benefit_data.htm
Sorry bout dat.

Play nicely now

The Guardian this week reported the case of several blogging critics of Sheffield Wednesday being unmasked. The judgment is up on BAILII.

Elsewhere apparently "claims of patent infringement are rife" within open source.

Athens toolbar - not quite there yet

The Athens toolbar has been around for quite a while now - the most recent version is almost one year old. It's a good idea in principle, but missing a few key features that could make it a vital addon.

When not logged into Athens the toolbar has only one option, which is to take you straight to the MyAthens login screen. Once logged in you have a drop down list of all your Athens resources, a log out button and a few account management options. Ok, these are relatively useful, but not really anything that couldn't be achieved with del.icio.us and some judicious tagging. Far better are the features that it doesn't have yet. Add in an easy way to switch between Athens accounts for those us of us with more than one that cover different areas and it's instantly more useful. How about a search box? I realise cross searching might still be a step too far, but a search engine box like Firefox's standard one which allows you to specify Westlaw or LexisNexis would save me literally seconds every day. Over the course of a year the savings could be as much as a couple of minutes. Until then I fear the toolbar might be taking up too much screen real estate to justify its existence.

More letters after your name than in it

They're all at it. The College of Law was granted the power to award degrees last year and has now awarded 599 LLB degrees to students who have completed their GDL and BVC or LPC courses. The Inns of Court School of Law allows BVC students to gain an LLM (in Professional Legal Skills) by completing a 15,000-20,000 word dissertation. Now BPP has also gained degree awarding powers. I understand that they will be offering LLB degrees to GDL students and will provide an option for BVC/LPC students to upgrade to an LLM by completing a couple of extra courses. The big question is what value will these qualifications have to the outside world?

This has made me think...

(You know, it's got me thinking)*. Yes, although it has been rather quiet round here lately (leading to a public rebuke), a number of interesting issues have arisen which have led me off of some tangential thoughts. One subject that has exercised me lately has been that of retribution and rehabilitation. The case of Chindamo started me off on this path. I appreciate that the world has moved on since then, but I must plead the defence of being exceptionally busy as I have started a new job and a new course at the same time, leading to me being quite behind the times at the moment. The issue of retribution and rehabilitation is central to why and to what extent we punish criminals for their crimes. Once they have served their time then the retributive component of that punishment must be over. This is why I have no issue with Learco Chindamo's right to stay in the UK upon his future release from prison. The argument could be made that the sentence itself is too short, but that is an entirely different issue. For what it's worth I think that the length of sentence is appropriate given his age, but it is an argument that I could entertain. What I cannot see is what the purpose of expelling him would be, when he is to all intents and purposes a UK national.

One of the most fascinating aspects of studying and working with the law is how it makes you think, challenges your preconceptions and then forces you to acknowledge that you may have been wrong. It's probably true to say that at certain levels the academic study of many subjects does this too, but what I have noticed with law is particularly how my own internal inconsistencies of argument are challenged. This leads me back to Chindamo. I have few difficulties in accepting that upon his release he should be allowed to try and build as normal a life as any other murderer. However, my initial reaction when I first heard that Lee Hughes was to be signed by Oldham Athletic FC was an outbreak of moral outrage. Hughes was a moderately succesful forward (0 goals in 23 Premier League games) whose chairman used to reward his goal scoring feats with gifts of fast cars. This proved to be a particularly bad idea when his Mercedes CL500 was involved in a crash which killed a passenger in another vehicle instantly. Another passenger died over a year later. Hughes went on the run for a day. Publawyer will wisely avoid to suggest that this would allow the Jack Daniels in his bloodstream to dissipate. During his incarceration he somewhat inevitably found religion and is now a 'changed man'. While I feel that the sentence (six years) is atrociously light I also have to accept that I cannot square my gut feelings on this with my thoughts on Chindamo. Unlike Oldham's chairman Simon Blitz I cannot cowardly refuse to pass moral judgement, but I can admit that once his sentence is complete perhaps Hughes does have the right to resume his career. I sometimes naively cling to the ideal the professional sportsmen should act as role models, but they are, at least from one perspective, all businessmen. Of course the other perspective is that football clubs are all institutions with their roots in the local community and should bear this in mind rather than scrambling mindlessly to reach the soul sapping money of the advertisers. Once they lose interest clubs are going to realise that all they have left is the fans.

Hughes has so far only played one game for Oldham, playing all 90 minutes of a 4-1 defeat to Hartlepool. Perhaps his punishment is still ongoing.

There are a couple of interesting current American cases to contrast these with. One is Michael Vick who is unlikely to play professional American Football again after his guilty plea to dog fighting and gambling charges (although note that the NFL's main objection is to the gambling not the animal cruelty), the other is the case of Scott McCausland. McCausland was convicted of piracy and upon his release from prison is only allowed to use a computer with monitoring software installed forcing him to use Windows. Cruel and unusual, anyone?

*10 indie prestige points to the first person to identify this line. Don't just google it, you're only cheating yourselves. Anyway if you do cheat how do you sleep? How do you last the night and keep the dogs at bay?

HR Update

I missed this when it first came out, but courtesy of the Consilio updater here is the latest Joint Committee on Human Rights report. It is 107 pages long so might be one for a lengthy train journey, but the topic (Older People in Healthcare) is vitally important and one of the areas where Human Rights legislation can potentially make a great difference, but which are traditionally ignored in the media hysteria about KFC for perps and convicts getting released when they've finished their sentences.