Stupidity of the system
I sometimes find myself despairing at the stupidity of the Criminal Justice System. It's 5am as I write this and I've just had a client charged with the offence of causing a public nuisance, which is an ancient common law offence of little value in the modern world - I tend to think that when an offence is so rooted in history that nearly all the major developments happened not in this century, nor the one before and only barely in the one before that it may be time to let the offence quietly die. The earliest case on public nuisance I can easily find that is still relevant dates from 1703 and the current definition of the offence appears to date from sometime prior to 1835! Public nuisance, no matter how ancient, isn't the stupidity that has me up and annoyed when I should be asleep. In this case, the accused was transiting the UK at a major airport. His flight was delayed and staff found his behaviour sufficiently egregious that they called police after a thr...