Season’s greetings to all. Here is a brief review of 2019 that, in the end, turned out to be not so brief. The new year is fraught with the prospect of yet another upcoming spell behind bars, for singing songs. More on that later…
unpaid work
Our corrupt System needs community payback
According to the British Sentencing Council’s definitive guidelines on the imposition of custodial sentences:
• A custodial sentence must not be imposed unless the offence or the combination of the offence and one or more offences associated with it was so serious that neither a fine alone nor a community sentence can be justified for the offence.
Furthermore, the Criminal Justice Act 2003, part 12, chapter 3, para. 9 (5), states:
Before making a suspended sentence order imposing two or more different requirements falling within subsection (1) [mine has no less that five], the court must consider whether, in the circumstances of the case, the requirements are compatible with each other.
And again quoting from the above guidelines:
• A suspended sentence MUST NOT be imposed as a more severe form of community order. A suspended sentence is a custodial sentence. Sentencers should be clear that they would impose an immediate custodial sentence if the power to suspend were not available. If not, a non-custodial sentence should be imposed.
At my conviction last May, District Judge John Zani was fairly precise in his indication that my offences were serious enough to warrant custody. My musical malice had “on the face of it”, passed the custody threshold and therefore I was facing a spell behind bars or – as it turned out – a custodial punishment in the form of a Suspended Sentence Order including slave labour plus four other requirements.
Are these requirements compatible? Not really. Forced labour plus a 12-month social media ban plus a fine prevent me from earning a crust. The strangest part of my order is the 20-day “Rehabilitation Requirement Activity” (RAR). Let me explain.
Chabloz walks free from court, again!
For the fifth time in 12 months, I walked free from court again yesterday – this time in a breach trial brought against me by the National Probation Service (NPS) for refusing to comply with the slave labour part of my Suspended Sentence Order.
First off, a brief explanation is necessary regards the difference between a Community Order (CO) and a Suspended Sentence Order (SSO). As one District Judge commented in a research paper published in 2008:
‘Well, prison is an ever-present part of one isn’t it [the SSO], but not of the other, and that’s the difference in a nutshell. There’s a real threat. As I see it, a Community Order is – look, we’re trying to help you – and anything to do with imprisonment is – look, we’re trying to threaten you.’
Hate crime’s alright if you’re non-white
Ben Weich in this week’s edition of the Jewish Chronicle confirms the gist of my previous post: police have received yet another vexatious complaint from the usual suspects and are therefore obliged to fulfil their duty and investigate my heretical comments regards Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. On and on it goes…
Today, I would like to comment on the atrocious double standards being applied by the English court system when it comes to so-called ‘hate crime’. I will return to foreign justice systems in a future article, specifically dealing with the current plights of Ursula Haverbeck and the Schaefer siblings in Germany (not forgetting Horst Mahler and Gerhard Ittner), as well as that of Canadian free speech advocate, Arthur Topham.
Alison Chabloz 