public nuisance and outraging public decency - Law Commission

“between 25 May 1992 and 13 June 2001, caused a
nuisance to the public, namely by sending 538 separate
postal packages, as detailed in the schedule … containing
racially offensive material to members of the public selected
by reason of their perceived ethnicity or for their support for
such a group or randomly selected in an attempt to gain
support for his views, the effect of which was to cause
annoyance, harassment, alarm and/or distress.”
No evidence has yet been called or facts formally admitted, but it is
not effectively in dispute that Mr Rimmington sent the packages listed
in the schedule to the identified recipients, some of them prominent
public figures, between the dates specified. The communications
were strongly racist in content, crude, coarse, insulting and in some
instances threatening and arguably obscene.
2.26 The prosecution relied on a series of cases concerning telephone calls. In
Norbury 58 and Johnson (Anthony) 59 the defendants had made obscene telephone
calls numbering in the hundreds to several women; in Millward 60 (an appeal
against sentence) there were large numbers of calls, not stated to be obscene, to
a single policewoman, with the probable result of disrupting the operation of the
station switchboard. Rimmington 61 lists further instances of guilty pleas based on
obscene calls, calls by animal liberationists to block a switchboard and hoax calls
to the emergency services.
2.27 There can be no doubt that, in most of these cases, the requirement of
annoyance or inconvenience to a sufficiently large number of people was
satisfied. The dissatisfaction felt in Rimmington was based on the fact that the
annoyance was inflicted on them singly and in series, thus not satisfying the
requirement of common injury. If each individual call does not amount to a public
nuisance, it is arbitrary to determine that, say, the hundredth call has the effect of
retrospectively turning the whole series up to then into a connected course of
conduct inflicting a common injury. 62 In other words, the analogy with the core
form of the offence, namely the environmental and neighbourhood cases with a
clear affinity to private nuisance, has been stretched too far for the telephone
cases still to qualify as the same offence. The relevant paragraph 63 is worth
quoting in full.
I cannot, however, accept that R v Norbury 64 and R v Johnson
(Anthony) 65 were correctly decided or that the convictions discussed
in paras 23 to 27 above were soundly based (which is not, of course,
58 [1978] Crim LR 435.
59 [1997] 1 WLR 367.
60 (1986) 8 Cr App R (S) 209.
61 Para 27.
62 Rimmington, para 48 (Lord Rodger).
63 Rimmington, para 37 (Lord Bingham).
64 [1978] Crim LR 435.
65 [1997] 1 WLR 367.
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