The Law Is An Ass (part 93)

A hot topic of conversation yesterday was the sentencing of 20 year old Matthew Woods for posting some "jokes" on line about the missing girl April Jones. He was sentenced to 12 weeks, for what appears to be a case of copying and pasting the comments from a sick joke website, that I am sure many of you know the name of.

Aside from this being an absolutely insane sentence, waste of money and time for all concerned, it again seems to show a total lack of understanding as to how many people view posts on line. It clearly upset at least one person enough to complain, but that could have been someone who just didn't like Matthew and wanted to cause some trouble.

What about the site that published the jokes first? What about other people who have posted them online? Surely one person cannot be the only person prosecuted for these words if they were that offensive and inflammatory - the courts should be rammed like the aftermath of the riots last year.

But then this morning, I noticed a very strange thing in the two papers I picked up at the station, The Metro and The Independent. They both printed the jokes in their stories about the sentencing. Unless this was some kind of "Spartacus" campaign to show how stupid the sentence was, which I doubt, why are the papers allowed to print jokes that will be read by far more people but as far as I can see no editors have been arrested and charged yet this morning?

If I posted those jokes on twitter maybe a few hundred people would see them, and if someone complained would I end up doing 12 weeks, but the papers, read by tens of thousands of people, if not more can publish them with no worries?

Surely Matthew Woods should be released today?