From the BBC:
BBC television presenter Ray Gosling is to be charged with wasting police time after claiming on air that he smothered his terminally ill lover. He was arrested on suspicion of murder and freed on bail after the broadcast.
The CPS said he had been summonsed to appear before Nottingham magistrates on 14 September.
The summons alleges that he "caused wasteful employment of the police by knowingly making to Bill Turnbull a false report tending to show that an offence had been committed. Contrary to sec 5 (2) of the Criminal Law Act 1967".
Absolutely bizarre. Unlike e.g. a bored young woman who goes to the police to allege rape, which has to be investigated and wastes oodles of police time and well as causing terrible distress to the suspect (see JuliaM for a compendium of these stories), all that Ray G did was to announce, on air*, that he had once hastened somebody's death.
Maybe he did, maybe he didn't, but shouldn't the CPS or the police (or whoever it was decided to arrest him) have applied some thought to this question first before barging in and making complete idiots of themselves?
Can we charge them with wasting their own time, Ray G's time and our money?
* Had Ray G actually walked up to the front desk of a police station and claimed, untruthfully, to have killed somebody, then that would have clearly been wasting police time.
Here's one I prepared earlier:
Friday, 20 August 2010
DoubleThink
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7 comments:
One wonders if this is a preamble to all suspects for crime being tried with wasting police time if they can't actually find any evidence...
RA, that is the logical next step. To make it a crime to be suspected of a crime.
So are they saying that any person who makes a claim (presumably in front of witnesses) that they have committed a crime, but which upon investigation turns out not to have happened, or is unprovable, is committing a crime?
So anyone who says in the pub 'I did 120 down the M1 at 3am once' should be arrested, cos the police could try to prove it, fail, and thus have wasted their time?
This country gets more and more surreal.
On reflection I suppose it could be a case of him telling them (once he had been arrested for the alleged 'murder')that he had lied on TV and nothing had happened. Because he couldn't actually admit to them he'd smothered the guy because then they would do him for murder. So to some extent the police have a case - either what he said on TV was true (in which case he should be done for that) or untrue (in which case he has wasted their time, because they would be bound to investigate an allegation of murder).
The moral of this story is - if you've done something a bit dodgy, keep it quiet. Certainly don't go on national TV and shoot your mouth off about it.
S, I don't think they are in any way bound to investigate it, short of somebody pressing charges or them finding a body.
As the Evening Standard said, the only way he can get off the 'wasting police time' charge is to prove he did it. NOW That's what I call Catch 22!
I expect it's just that the police don't like homosexuals. It must have been a real pisser for them when it was made legal.
B, don't you mean: "It must have been a real bummer for them when it was made legal"?
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