Article from the September 2012 issue of Noseweek Magazine.
The twitter Joke Trial, as it has become known in the UK, has taken the past two-and-a-half years to play itself out – until Friday 27 July, when the matter finally reached the High Court in London and came before a bench whose stock-in-trade were common sense and a sense of justice.
What has become of Her Majesty’s courts that it takes so long and you have to travel that far to find just a grain of common sense?
In January 2010, Paul Chambers, 26, an administration and finances supervisor from Doncaster, and using the Twitter handle @PaulJChambers, was planning to fly to Belfast, Northern Ireland to meet the love of his life, @Crazycolours, whom he had met on Twitter.
At the time, Britain was being battered by Arctic weather and Doncaster’s Robin Hood Airport was slowly being snowed in. Chambers, in the course of his casual banter with his prospective paramour, sent her the following messages, which would later be deemed “menacing”:
“@Crazycolours I was thinking that if it [the airport] does [close] then I had decided to resort to terrorism”:
“@Crazycolours That’s the plan! I am sure the pilots will be expecting me to demand a more exotic location than NI”.
And once the weather had closed the airport, he sent this one:
“@Crazycolours Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I am blowing the airport sky high!!”
His 600 tweeps (Twitter followers) who’d seen what he had tweeted were not alarmed or fearful in any way. Nor did they regard the tweets as “menacing”. But, five days later, Shaun Duffield, a security manager from the airport, was scouring through Twitter looking for references to Robin Hood Airport (automatically identified by Twitter) when he came across Chambers’s tweet.
He dutifully reported it to his manager, John Armson, whose job it was to assess any perceived threat. Armson saw the “threat” as “non-credible” – as did the airport police.
They passed the file on to the South Yorkshire Police who, in turn, asked the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for advice. (Reluctance to accept responsibility is contageous.)
Chambers was convicted in the Doncaster Magistrate’s Court and had to pay £985 in fines and court costs. He also lost his job.
He then appealed to the Doncaster Crown Court, where an equally humourless Judge Jacqueline Davies, sitting with two magistrates, decided the tweets had been “menacing” and that he obviously knew that they would be taken seriously.
There were two appeals to the High Court in London. In the first, in February this year, technical points were raised and Lord Justice Goss and Justice Irwin dismissed the appeal was dismissed. In the second, in June, The Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, The Lord Judge [His family name is Judge. – Ed.] and two other senior judges heard Chambers’s appeal.
The CPS, meanwhile, advised Chambers’s lawyers they would not oppose the appeal this time. But, in a cringeworthy volte-face CPS boss Keir Starmer QC, who in a previous life as a human rights lawyer fought fiercely for liberty of the individual, truth and justice, overruled them and ordered that the appeal be opposed.
Chambers was finally acquitted on 27 July, on the basis that “this ‘tweet’ did not constitute or include a message of a menacing character”. He also won with costs.
