A Freedom of Information request has confirmed that zero prosecutions have been made successfully under the Coronavirus Act. The request asked: “Since its inception – how many prosecutions have been made successfully under Coronavirus Act?” The response, given on Monday by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), reads as follows:
Since the CPS started its review on finalised cases charged under the Coronavirus Act 2020 (the Act) in April 2020 and up until February 2021, we found that all offences charged under the Act were incorrectly charged, and therefore discontinued because there was insufficient evidence to prove the offences under the Act. There were no cases where a suspect was convicted under the Act as of February 2021.
In April, the Independent reported on the “embarrassment” caused to the justice system by incorrect prosecutions made under the Coronavirus Act and the Health Protection Regulations.
Every one of the 232 prosecutions brought under the Coronavirus Act was incorrect, with its misuse described as an “embarrassment” to the justice system. [The figure will, of course, have gotten much higher.]
A further 127 wrongful charges were brought under the Health Protection Regulations, which were created to enforce the first nationwide lockdown in March 2020 and have been changed numerous times for different restrictions.
They represent around 12% of prosecutions under the law, which is more commonly enforced by police using fines…
The Liberty human rights group called for the Government to support people to follow health guidance rather than having a “relentless focus on enforcement”…
[Director Gracie Bradley said:] “It’s… impossible to know how many unlawful fines have already been paid by people too afraid to challenge them – the Government must urgently introduce a right to appeal fines. Frequent and high-profile instances of arbitrary and wrongful enforcement have fanned the flames of mistrust.”The CPS figures only cover finalised cases in England and Wales, and more prosecutions are currently progressing through the courts.
Reports issued by parliament’s Home Affairs Committee and Joint Committee on Human Rights had called for mistakes by police to stop in April, warning of the potential for miscarriages of justice and punishment “without any legal basis”.
MPs said that some police officers appeared to be enforcing Government guidance rather than the law, and that differences between the two were causing confusion among the public and law enforcement…
The vast majority of wrongful prosecutions were brought by police and withdrawn by the CPS before people were convicted, but 56 cases had to be returned to court to be quashed.
They include a woman who was fined £660 for a crime she had not committed, five days after the Coronavirus Act became law last March.
It gives police the power to direct “potentially infectious persons” to a place suitable for screening and assessment, and take them by force if they refuse.
The law makes it a criminal offence punishable by a fine of up to £1,000 to refuse a direction, escape or provide false information.
Isn’t it about time the Act was repealed?
The Independent report is worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
A long time ago someone told me something very valuable, that i use to this day:
Alternatively: Never obey unjust rules that cannot be enforced.
“the process is the punishment”
Unfortunately, any rule can be enforced provided that there are a small enough number prepared to stand up to it. That number can be kept small and insignificant and usually is by one of two methods. Either generate fear of what will be done to you if you fail to comply or generate a panic over what will happen to you if others don’t comply.
The second of these is of course applied automatically when you effectively sensor almost all of the valid arguments against the legislation in question. If you then make sure what little opposition is left public comes only from sources that can be labelled as “crank” or “conspiracy theory” you can maintain your draconian measures indefinitely.
As a matter of interest has anyone noticed any mention of the anti lockdown march a few weeks ago in any of the mainstream media?
I’d happily go all the way to court/jail and/or burn everything I own before paying a penny for a covid restriction related fine. I was half looking forward to it.
I’m surprised after a year of this nonsense that I still haven’t got nicked. I was just gonna laugh in their faces as they gave me the spiel and tell them I was NEVER paying one penny come hell or high water. Still time I guess.
I made that vow at the start and tried to tell anyone who would listen to do the same.
Can you hear that? We really are in the twilight Zone…!
The Act must be repealed – nothing less will do.
does this mean the scouser attacked on the train by coppers will get off scott free?
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/man-who-refused-wear-face-22627930
First what is wrong with coming from Liverpool and what do you mean by scott free? The gentlemen is innocent.
Can we have a sticky for known trolls perhaps, Fon to top the list.
fon is defined as a virus under the Act, and therefore has special protection.
I’ve got Fond of Fon. He’s only lonely, cos the pubs are shut.
The guy said he had a medical condition. Which is highly likely. The range is wide. The police made no effort to check that, and pepper spraying or removal was not lawful on their part. I hope he is pursuing them through the courts.
The real question is whether the copper – clearly guilty of assault – gets off.
Any bets?
The Crown has immunity for incompetence so people wrongly charged and subjected to worry stress and expense can get no recompense. Incompetent plod gets away with it again.
I really don’t understand people. I mean things like this really shake my faith in the system and make me ask questions like “are doctors competent?”, “are highway planners competent?”, “”do politicians have my best interests at heart at all?”, “do lawyers and police have any sense of justice or duty to justice?”, “are university departments as knowledgeable and free thinking as we assume?”. Yet people don’t seem to react to institutional systemic decadence by questioning how the system works or whether people are competent. I guess that’s why it’s decadent…
The answers to your questions are no, no, no, no and no. There are no external moderators, no sense of honour or decency, no-one understands the meaning of truth any more, and they are all blatant, incorrigible liars and cowards, too busy milking the system to actually give a damn about anything apart from their own career.
I used to think all scientists, at least, had a tendency to be honest, and they were usually unmanageable in industry as they were all cynical, critical, independent thinkers. Now they all seem as bent as estate agents, lawyers and coppers. The pursuit of knowledge has been usurped by pursuit of profit.
My questions were largely rhetorical, but yes I agree.
On an evening walk today I saw a car with a red light in the windscreen. I thought “that’s rather irresponsible, what’s going on with that? It looks like a brake light”. Turned out that it was a heads up display or some kind of lit up display you could see through that was part of the car’s dashboard design. That would never have passed legal design checks before. Who’s bright idea was that? How did it get from drawing board to production? You see a lot of things like this that you wonder how they come about. They are increasingly common. It’s as if everything is breaking down. There’s even a road junction with traffic lights near me that hasn’t worked for years because they designed it wrong. The council switched them all off FFS!
Because all the independent certification agencies were “disappeared” . That’s why car dashboards are now a triumph of design over usability, increasing the risk of accident as the driver has to stare at the soft controls and fiddle, road lighting and car lights are a menace, manufacturers seduced by the lighting industry milking the green energy goddess. We used to have a transport and road research lab, a couple of decades back, suspect it’s gone too, or turned profit and grant taking.
wrongly.
Come on Eagle,
You missed the most bent – journalists.
My bad.
The problem is that those questions require impossible answers – because they imply wild generalizations rather than clarity. The propositions are immediately falsifiable because they aren’t questions of the real world.
Go on, ask people about this tomorrow. Ask them what happens when you break the “rules”. We’ve known for months that the way to handle any fines was to not pay and await the court date. We knew the government were just using psychological tactics against its own people to make them think any of this lawful. That we now couldn’t visit our friends, or exert our freedoms as sovereign individuals.
You know what most people will still say? You’re a conspiracy theorist. That’s how completely lost they are.
And a wannabe granny killer.
Bit like how the deaths were “incorrectly” labelled as Covid deaths. The evidence that this is a scam is so large now, surely some shit is going to hit the fan? Surely they can’t just get away with this?
Good website here, has lots of very interesting links and material, including this. A Freedom Of Information reply from Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust And North West Boroughs Healthcare Foundation Trust confirming that the number of people who died in their region of Covid19 with no pre-existing conditions up to 30th November 2020…….ZERO.
FOI request shows the real number of deaths. MORE PROOF. Amazing
https://awarriorcalls.com/pdfs/request.for.real.number.of.deaths.pdf
More citizen journalism. Very good.
Not before every MP that has ever proposed, backed or abstained on draconian C19 legislation (that was clearly trampling all over civil liberties and inalienable human rights from the get go) loses their right to ever again be a public representative. More than that they should be immediately dragged into detention to be hauled in front of the relevant tribunal charged with crimes against humanity.
No member of this corrupt government and its insipid, spineless opposition should get away with this. And as for the MSM, its daily all out assaults in print and on air against ‘irresponsible protesters’, ‘conspiracy nuts’, ‘anti-vaxxers’ and ‘covidiots’ for not obeying these inhuman guidelines amounted to a level of coercive propaganda seldom seen since the 1930s. The Independent (with the Graun and the BBC) was one of the worst offenders btw, as it gleefully championed the indefinite erosion of civil liberties.
And now it is all starting to unravel, and I would be amazed that even our cowering, deferential masked up flockulace don’t begin to look up from grazing on furlough and twitch their noses very soon; hopefully before Big Pharma (with the Government’s, teachers’ and parents’ blessing) sets its sights on sacrificing up to 2000 schoolchildren (using government MHRA figures) before Xmas with wholly unnecessary experimental gene therapy.
isn’t furlough permanent, like quantitative easing? we might not technically run out of money, but a lot of people will suffer none the less
I don’t know the UK situation, but it is usually possible to fight any fine in such a way that it costs the government far more than the size of the fine, even if it isn’t over-turned. The system just relies on people paying up without a fuss. Be the fuss!
And no doubt the Treasury has benefitted from those daft enough pay any so-called ‘fines’ issued by the zealots. If this information about the CPS review is well advertised, the Gov has lost it. Not only that, it’s a serious loss of faith in governmental politics in general. Who trusts them now?
I don’t trust the police anymore or the Government, I got a fine for being with my Family, and the letter I got says if you want to fight the FPN then its take it to court and if you lose you get a criminal record and the fine is unlimited, seems like I am worse then the criminals that just get £60 fines etc etc, the police have no idea how much faith this has taken out of them although I don’t think it was there fault some of them actually enjoyed giving out fines, but others really thought they were doing there jobs and probably not wanting to be there, but the letter they send is quiet intimidating.
their fault
Snide cops have been doing it for years with speed cameras. If we had stood up to them over that we wouldn’t now have them bypassing the courts in relation to covid transgressions.
Hardly a surprise when the idiot who replied to the FOI request does not know the difference between ‘office’ and ‘offence’. (See 1st paragraph)
An indication of the deterioration of the skouls I suppose.
I noticed that too, but if you look at the actual letter it says “offences” in both places.
The danger of thinking that ‘Spell check’ means ‘Context check’. A common mistake among those who use the default ‘English US’ as their dictionary in Word and also the default font
“fount” is the British English word. Just as we use “colour” rather than “color”
Like furloughing, I imagine, The Coronavirus Act has been fabulously successful for the Government. Most compliant muzzle wearing Gimps simply wouldn’t question The Act, or the Law, in any shape or form. Simply aquiesce, get in the cupboard, and clap your hands when asked to !! Punters watching ‘Ant and Dec’ on Saturday nights, and eating Jaffa cakes, are the scariest types imaginable. Believe anything !!
Many people have paid fixed penalties with no court involvement. This is a proven business model used by the speed camera industry and is an affront to justice. Clearly if you are given a Covid FPN you should insist on going to court instead.
So it was all a bluff.
Not surprising – imagine the chaos if these cases were brought to court. I think it’s one aspect of the shit-show that we might have enjoyed.
“MPs said that some police officers appeared to be enforcing Government guidance rather than the law”
I see, so it was the police’s fault then. Or was it the victim’s fault? Couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the idiots who implemented the whole good for nothing whatsoever shitfest in the first place.
It’s both. The No 10 clown show is a disgrace, of course. But the police are supposed to be professional. If they are are handed a crock of shit the should recognise it as such. If they are too incompetent to work out the difference between guidance and law they should treat it all as guidance not as law. They are a disgrace too.
my jaw hit the floor when I read this. I just had to go through the funeral of my father with my mother determined to stick to the “rules” because she did not want to be fined. No gathering afterwards to celebrate a life well lived …. What a massive shit show this has been
So sorry to hear that, awful, a final rite denied. Hope you are soon able to organize a celebration or memorial for your Father’s life.
Weren’t we here this time last year?