The Crown Prosecution Service has issued a press release today saying it has decided that Ray Gosling should be prosecuted for wasting police time under section 5(2) of the Criminal Law Act 1967, following his Inside Out broadcast on 15 February. Obviously I don’t know exactly what Ray Gosling told the police when he was called in for questioning earlier this year. But based on what we do know, I’m troubled by the decision – which I think is against the public interest.
The timing is interesting: Nottinghamshire Police presumably laid the information at Nottingham Magistrates’ Court over a week ago, just in time to prosecute within the time limit imposed by section 127 of the Magistrates Courts Act 1980 (although it’s worth mentioning we can’t be sure that the prosecution is based on the broadcast itself, or on what Gosling said to the police after his arrest on the 17 February).
More important is the substance. Ray Gosling did not go to the police: they came to arrest him, a decision that was questionable in itself. Even if what he did amounted to
knowingly making to any person a false report tending to show that an offence has been committed
in the words of section 5(2), it’s less obvious that he caused wasteful employment of the police. You might argue they caused the waste of their own, and Gosling’s, time. Did anyone call for a murder investigation?
In any event, it’s not clear that any public interest factor here tends to favour prosecution under the CPS’s own guidance, except the amount of time the police spent on their investigation – which is surely not Ray Gosling’s responsibility given that he didn’t seek their involvement in the first place.
Most critically of all, it seems to me this decision fails to give due weight to freedom of expression. Ray Gosling’s Inside Out broadcast was a serious, personal and emotional contribution to a current debate about euthanasia. It was in a wholly different category from a malicious complaint to the police, and deserves much higher protection under the article 10 Convention right. How the CPS, and the DPP himself who had to consent, can have concluded that the balance of public interest favoured prosecution – and the consequent chilling effect that decision has on confessional memoirs in writing and broadcasting – I don’t know. The interference with Gosling’s and the BBC’s free speech can only be justified in the interests of preventing crime, but it is clearly disproportionate to that aim.
Anyone troubled by the less serious limits that privacy law has put on tabloid sexposés should be much more concerned about this real free speech issue.
If the “confession” was substantially true but it did not amount to any offence then I agree with you. However, if it was a complete fabrication, which the CPS seem to think it was, then there must be a good chance that it was engineered to trigger his arrest and make political capital from it. Article 10 does not protect outright lies.
Why not? It protects fiction.
I think to sue someone for a lie may be a justified interference with their freedom of expression in the interests of your own rights and reputation. The question in this case is whether prosecution (a more severe invasion of free speech) is justified to prevent crime. What crime? There was none, until the police themselves chose to get involved.
All confessions of murder have to be investigated – to do otherwise is a breach of Article 2. What he confessed to was very serious in that he suggested that the lover had not expressly asked to be “put out of his misery” and that it had been done without the knowledge of his family or his doctor. Nor did he withdraw the confession on his arrest but he kept the police on a wild goose chase for months.
Had he written a fiction about such a killing, broadcast in a drama slot, instead of a documentary, he would not have been prosecuted.
I see no merit whatseover in this prosecution. Here is the CPS link:-
http://www.cps.gov.uk/news/press_releases/134_10/
James – I’m not sure that withdrawing the confession would change much. Surely the police wouldn’t stop investigating because he said it didn’t happen?
Withdrawing the confession would have changed the gravity of the offence. Among the criteria that the CPS will consider in deciding whether to prosecute is persistent repetition of the false report. It would also have reduced distress to the family of the person killed because, without a name, they would not have been asked about it.
Outrageous behaviour by the police, who are clearly weighing in on the side of the Anti-Euthanasia lobby. The so called ‘murder’ was not reported at the time and was only subsequently investigated by the police following Ray Gosling’s ‘confession’. He certainly did not waste their time – they managed this perfectly well themselves – probably in a very real attempt to make some sort of example out of such a public figure. Even more ridiculous that public funds should have been wasted during the police’s investigation. The CPS are now compounding this folly with his prosecution for ‘wasting police time’. If the issues at stake here weren’t so serious – the whole story could be seen as farcical.
Euthanasia is a red herring here. The circumstances to which the confession related would be murder in Switzerland and would be murder in the Netherlands. No-one should draw this link unless they are arguing for a law which goes far further than anything that has ever been proposed, in the UK or anywhere else in the world.