Student jailed for tweeting about Muamba

He just reads like some moron posting offensive stuff on the internet to wind people up/take the piss.

Massive troll backfire indeed, but it's not like he's some card carying fascist espousing white nationhood yada yada. I don't feel hugely sorry for him but the sentence is total bullshit, 56 fucking days in jail? Did he tweet about pinching some Evian as well?

Respectable and 'well regarded' members of the community come up with far more deeply insidious racist shit which they deeply believe on a daily basis. In public. Twitter users' sensibilities are not a good decider when it comes to the state punishing people. As for universities taking action, and people being called to account for what they've said, that's good n fair enough, but this sentence just comes off as a scare tactic.

I often think about some of the stuff I say online (anti police/goverment style stuff) and wonder how much of it is going to come back and bite me in the arse. As soon as they start locking people up for stuff like this, it's a slippery slope for what constitutes something worthy of locking someone up for something they've said online. As much as I disslike what this twunt has said, he has the right to free speach, aslong as it's not inciting violence against others. Where will it end? See you all in guitmo!

While hard to feel sorry for the twat, it seems disproportionate to me, considering what people get away with while posting on the net. Surely losing his chance of getting a degree coupled with community service would have made more sense. John Terry is facing a maximum £2500 fine if found guilty (he earns around £25000 a day).

indeed. it's offensive what he wrote certainly, and from looking at the other comments he posted, its quite apparent that he was being quite deliberately offensive in what he wrote over those few hours to many people, as news of what he'd written spread like wildfire. however, if everyone who says and does something offensive when pissed is going to be locked up, the prisons would be filling up pretty damned quick.

The judge seems to be getting confused between public outrage and the media's obsession with anything involving twitter

Sounds like a druken grand slam winning rugger fan got carried away and let msk slip/ got caught up saying to shock forggetting how public Twitter is. The fucking vile idiot.

Should get booted out ouf uni and publicly tarred and feather.

I wonder how much the sentence is testing to see how keen the public is on locking people that are posting on Twitter.

I’ve no doubt that he’s a vile man, who by the sound of it was drunk at the time he posted, but what remains disturbing about the case is that the Crown offered no evidence that Stacey had incited racial violence or any other crime. That his speech was racist was enough to send him down. This verdict, like so many others, shows how little confidence the judiciary has in wider society. It’s as if the judges, politicians and the police believe that a neo-Nazi can turn the usually placid British into Ku Klux Klan supporters with a few inflammatory words; that we are a bomb just waiting for someone to light the fuse and ignite us.

Nick Cohen in the Spectator

'7 members of the U75 bulletin board were jailed for various online hate offences yesterday, custodial sentences were imposed regarding comments made over the recent savaging of Cuntstable Cockers and PC K. Nob by a savage illegal dog. The comments spread around twitter and complaints were made to the Metropolitan police. Custodial sentences were also imposed for comments made about MEP Nick Griffin; with one member of the violent anarchist site (as yet unnamed for legal reasons) posting that he hoped "the devil's horny razor d**k scullf***s the red, white & blue out of the c**ts empty eyesocket in hell'"

Maybe i'm exaggerating.

tbh, the worst thing that could happen to him is spending 9k a year on a university 'education' that'll get him absolutely nowhere in today's world... he's got off the hook here by being thrown out of the 'education' system.

he should be made to a fucking masters as punishment for being such a twunt.

By the holy law of schadenfreude I'm happy to see some racist moron get what's coming to him - this one, tram lady, all the fucking lot of 'em. However, the idea that the state will jail people according to current whims and whatever there is a mass of public sentiment about is another matter (even if those sentiments around the Muamba case are good - sympathy for him and a kind of anti racist recognition of everything his family went through before coming here). But what's next, people getting hauled in for causing 'distress' with comments about the queens jubileee or the olympics?

Suppose underneath it all is the issue of saying shit in cyberspace, thinking you are addressing 'the internet' rather than real people, in a consequence free way. He's certainly been disabused of that idea - fuck him - but the state is looking both more knee jerk and interventionist in these cases. Ditto his university.

Nope. Current students don't have to pay the new fees. If he gets kicked out, he will no longer be exempt and will have to pay the new fees if he wants to do a degree in future.

That's not an outcome I would find myself too unhappy about, but it will probably make it a lot harder for the disciplinary committee at the university. Not at all easy to make a decision like that when the consequences are so harsh (for this year only).

I agree with everything except the bolded bit. Universities have responsibilities to all their students. They cannot ignore that kind of publicly expressed racial abuse (or sexist, homophobic or disablist abuse). It's easy to pontificate about this when you've not been on the receiving end of the kind of atmosphere created when these attitudes are widely tolerated - but there are very good reasons why universities take this sort of shit very seriously these days.

For sure, he should be disciplined by the college and severely warned to his behaviour in the future, but will it educate him as to the error of his ways by kicking him out, or could it simply entrench his social dysfunction and actually embed such sentiments in future?

Strangely enough, my comment about the university being kneejerk was inspired by your earlier post. What I meant was they are quick to react to something in the news that will attract negative publicity, but useless when it comes to the hard grind of responding to real, long term cases like the abuse suffered by your partner. Same in terms of the state, they will take the easy route of jailing tram lady et al, but do very little to address racism as a systemic issue.

He will have had 3 years worth of loans, so presumably would have to pay up front to do his final year again? (if another uni would take him and transfer his credits).

Are we going to see the police investigate anything that causes outrage on twitter? Mensch was kicking up a stink the other day after a labour councillor was wishing death on Thatcher, is that a crime?

I don't think it's relevant. This is about protecting the learning environment for other students, fuck all to do with rehabilitating him. He can do with the experience what he will, he just can't expect to be allowed to hang around the place if he behaves like that. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from the consequences of that speech, and being removed from an environment where you threaten the freedoms of others is one such consequence.

They may well fall short of expulsion - depending on how he handles himself and what suitable alternatives there are. There will be various student groups getting involved and being consulted. Much may come down to how he behaves himself generally. If he has a reputation for making racist/homophobic 'jokes' then his chances will be significantly worse than if his rep is basically OK around campus.

I'd have given him life then let him out after 48 hours evil and it's just a bit of fun the Racist twat.
Nobody hurt nothing damaged and 48 hours in jail thinking your going to spend years inside seems sadistic enough.

tbf his uni should hang its head in shame letting the racist homophobe anywhere near their campus in the first place.

You want them to employ thought police for admissions?

Reading back through his earlier tweets it's blatantly obvious what kind of fucknut this twat is, unless of course he's a perfect angel in real life and just turns in to a boorish, homophobic, racist prick whenever he logs on to twitter.

I agree. However, in taking the route they have though - summary dismissal - they seem to be defending their reputation and playing a tokenistic anti-racist card (rather than dealing with racism). At one level it's as much as you can expect. Big institutions will at best have institutional responses to inequaltiy driven by PR, legislation and the fear of litigation. As always I've certainly no objection when the state or a big organisation kicks a racist, homophobe, sexist or whatever, just that I don't trust the state to do these things.

The moron appears to have a rape fixation. Perhaps a more apposite punishment would have been to threaten him with what he seems to have wished on lots of peoples' mothers and dogs.

From the way he burst in to tears I suspect he's fearing just that, the pathetic twonk.

Fuck him. Glad he's gone down and I hope he gets a big black fella (who know's why he's in) for a cellmate.

Wishing death on anyone should be a crime.

Yes, certainly, but that still begs the question about what the university should do about those characteristics of it's students. That was a reply to you, but is an open question. I think ymu has it right, as an employer/place of study, they have to look at what students actually do and say in the university, interacting with other students, staff etc. That's their institutional responsibility. Where this merges into monitoring twitter traffic and the like is where it gets messy.

Strangely enough, twitter is full of other people now wishing that he'll get raped in prison, "jokes" about the soap and the showers etc.

OK yeah - I completely agree with that. Although to be fair, I was referring to a situation as it existed in the 1990s, which is not very reflective of how it works now - I didn't make it clear enough that times have changed. But you are right - there is an awful lot of insidious shite that gets ignored in favour of grand gesture stuff.

Like Oxford blatantly manipulating its admissions figures to claim that they had increased the proportion of black students last year, when the situation has actually got worse (they compared it with two years previously, not one year previously, and changed classifications between black/Caribbean/African to mask what was happening to British students of Caribbean descent, as opposed to the increasing numbers of rich African overseas students). My partner has been to three colleges and two universities and was the only black kid in his year at all of them. Dunno if anyone saw the excellent "My Murder" last night, but there is so much subtle genius in the way they got this kind of stuff across in the scripting and filming - very, very skillful work. It rang so many bells with him, we were talking about it for hours.

That's equally pathetic. Wishing rape on anyone is just nasty, thinking that prisons are full of folk being raped is just showing how thick some people are.

I think it's just suspension at the moment, isn't it? If they've expelled him already, then yeah - very wrong, but I'm not sure they could get through the legals that quickly.