"He was arrested after a tip-off from a neighbour with whom he was in a dispute over access to a sewage pipe," begins the Free Speech Union's account of Stephen Gray, 65, a retired County Durham police officer; the pipe went no further, but two Facebook reposts did.
The first paired "time for mass deportation" with a supposed 12-year-old migrant asking donors to move him from a three-star hotel to one with "a better halal menu, free wifi and Sky" nearer a girls' school. The judge called that "a political issue which had been debated in Parliament" and acquitted him; the second read, "Fun facts about Bacon! People who eat bacon have a lower chance of marrying a 9-year-old!" and that one cost £1,000.
Gray said the second post was "intended to be satirical" and meant to "spark a serious debate" about Mohammed's marriage to Aisha and child marriage in Muslim countries, The Telegraph reported. District Judge Steven Hood found it "designed to be offensive" and not capable of seriousness because it was "framed in a jokey way," so English comedy has acquired paperwork.
The Crown Prosecution Service first found "no realistic prospect of conviction" and declined to charge Gray. His non-Muslim neighbor used the Victims' Right to Review scheme, under which the CPS says an unhappy complainant has "the right to ask us to look at our decision again" and need only say "that you would like us to look at our decision again," and the review produced a prosecution.
Section 127 covers anyone who "sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive" or "of an indecent, obscene or menacing character," while Parliament supplied the adjectives; Hood supplied the boundary between political and religious mockery; Gray calls it "blasphemy law by the back door". His appeal is due in November.
