Backbytes: Strict liability offences - they're grrrrrreat!

Charges against bus driver accused of receiving 'extreme pornography' dropped when Crown Prosecution Service admitted the video was a fake

Politicians in the UK in recent years have become especially keen on strict liability offences*. They're ace for fining people for speeding and parking offences because guilt or intent does not need to be proven in the same way that it does for, say, murder.

And, ever since politicians and their "useful friends" started having moral palpitations over the internet, strict liability offences have ballooned for an ever-expanding range of crimes.

So strict have these strict liability offences become that it is now an offence just to receive an anonymous email with "illegal" content - regardless of whether you open the email, and even if you delete it without viewing it and it's still found in some form on your device, you'll be whacked by the long arm of the law.

Backbytes highlighted two months ago the case of two people given astonishingly harsh sentences merely for the crime of having received some smut from an anonymous, possibly malicious source, and then getting prosecuted when the police decided to trawl their phones after they were picked up for unrelated offences.

And that's not an isolated case. Bus driver Andrew Holland only had a case from December 2009 dropped after the Crown Prosecution Service admitted that the video sent to him unsolicited didn't amount to an "extreme pornographic image" after all.

The video of a woman apparently engaged in coitus with a tiger turned out to be a bloke in a tiger suit - and it took the Crown Prosecution Service five years to work that out. According to The Independent, officials at the Crown Prosecution Service realised their mistake when the costumed man said: "That's grrrrrreat" - the catchphrase of Frosties cereal mascot Tony the Tiger.

In the meantime, Holland has been the subject of a sustained hate campaign, and had been denied contact with his young daughter for more than a year. "I lost my job, I had to move and I ended up having a heart attack with all the stress of it," he said. "People were ringing me in the middle of the night... I was threatened on more than one occasion."

Holland was prosecuted under a law introduced in January 2009, which made it a strict liability offence to possess "extreme pornographic images". It makes it an offence to possess pornographic images that depict acts which threaten a person's life; acts which result in or are likely to result in serious injury to a person's anus, breasts or genitals; bestiality; or necrophilia.

Strict liability means that the benevolent authorities that watch over and protect us don't need to prove trifling things like intent.

Which is all very well, if it's being used simply to fine and jail people who have been sent such images unsolicited, is it really justice?

* According to Wikipedia, "Strict liability laws were created in the 19th century to improve working and safety standards in factories. Needing to prove mens reas [Latin for "guilty mind"] on the part of the factory owners was very difficult and resulted in very few prosecutions. The creation of strict liability offences meant that convictions were increased. Common strict liability offences today include the selling of alcohol to under-age people."