That brings our coverage of today's sentencing hearing to an end - thank you for joining us. To recap: Former foootballer Joey Barton has been given a suspended prison sentence for creating grossly offensive social media posts aimed at broadcaster Jeremy Vine and pundits Lucy Ward and Eni Aluko.
Hardly a valid use of court time, I feel. Unless he made threats to harm them, it was something that should have been dealt with purely via the complaints procedure of the social media apps in question. So did he make death threats?
His trial heard he had "crossed the line between free speech and a crime" with six posts on X including comparing Aluko and Ward to serial killers Fred and Rose West, and calling Vine a "bike nonce". Barton, originally of Huyton, Merseyside, was jailed for six months but told his sentence would be suspended for 18 months.
That's it!? No wonder Vine and the others went squealing to the police, that wouldn't have even been covered by the media company complaints systems - they'd have simply been told to block him and ignore him. But thatwouldn't have sat well with the egos of these people, who are used to support systems that prevent them ever hearing what people really think of them, and they have people who know just what you need to say to get the useless police on your side:
In victim impact statements read to court on Monday, Vine called Barton "a small man who feeds off the pain of others"; Ward said she was "constantly afraid"; while Aluko said she was "humiliated"
None of those things justifies arrest and trial of Barton. Even if we weren't so short of court time that a moron is considering overthrowing centuries of our judicial safeguards..
Just going back over the judge's sentencing comments, it is clear that Andrew Menary KC was keen to talk about where the boundaries lie in the freedom of speech debate. He told Joey Barton: "Robust debate, satire, mockery and even crude language may fall within permissible free speech.
"But when posts deliberately target individuals with vilifying comparisons to serial killers or false insinuations of paedophilia, designed to humiliate and distress, they forfeit their protection.
As the jury concluded, your offences exemplify behaviour that is beyond this limit - amounting to a sustained campaign of online abuse that was not mere commentary but targeted, extreme and deliberately harmful."
Absolute bollocks.
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