BMW, I had a quiet word with his wife just to say that her husband had been helping us with a few matters. I noticed Patrick was standing by the driver’s door and I couldn’t quite see what he was up to. As the BMW drove off, all became clear: on the car’s roof aerial Patrick had stuck something, and there it was, pointing proudly upward, the monster fifteen-inch bright-pink rubber dildo wobbling in the wind. Our upstanding Member in the car now also had one on top of it.
We were having a problem with porn. It wasn’t that we weren’t getting enough of it – we were making seizures every few days. The quandary we had was that, when the cases hit the magistrates’ court, they were giving out minimal fines regardless of the different types of material. So we set up a meeting with the local magistrates to see what the problem was.
Now, the local magistrates were rather aged and that was the first problem. Their experience of the varied content of pornography was rather limited. Just like the myth that the reason there was no law against lesbianism was because Queen Victoria refused to believe that there was such a thing so the law was limited to male homosexuality in order to get royal assent, so it was with our local bench: they believed that the only pornography available was the standard male/female vanilla missionary kind. We had to think of a way to open their eyes – preferably without stopping their hearts.
The second problem that we had was the chap who was the head of the magistrates. He was the squire of some large estate and when sitting in court he would, believe it or not, always wear a white suit and monocle. He looked like a cross between the Man from Del Monte and a Nazi scientist. Which must have been bloody terrifying for those that were up in front of him. That terrifying effect didn’t last long for pornography-smuggling offences, as chances were that he would hand out only a £50 fine and a slap on the wrist. Amazingly, he did pretty much the same for drug smugglers.
But should you appear for an offence that involved illegal activity in something in which he took an interest – such as hunting, shooting or fishing (or knobbing the downstairs staff, probably) – then he would reach for his black cap and try to bring back hanging. If he had been on the bench 200 years ago, he would have been transporting people to Australia for not doffing their cap to him. So that was what we were up against when we had to bring the magistrates into the present day, and fast.
What we urgently needed to do was list all the offences involving pornographic material, plus explain about the trusty old Customs Consolidation Act 1876 (the law that enabled us to seize the goods). So we got together and invented what we called the porno tick sheet. This required a Customs officer to sit through a whole film and tick off each sexual act as it happened. The poor bastard. You can imagine the stampede for this duty.
This form, the porno tick sheet, would then make up the prosecution package and the magistrates could compare the tick sheet to the detailed description of the act that we provided to all the local magistrates. We wrote it in our best and most detached medical language so as not to excite the old magistrates too much and push too many of them into an early grave – the risk of the male members having to be buried sideways in their coffins because of rigor mortis issues leading to difficulties in closing the lid was a very tempting outcome to aim for, but we managed to resist going for it.
Our final push for the modernization of the magistrates’ porno education was to invite one of them to the airport to view a sample of the videos we often seized; this would hopefully make them the local court expert on pornography. This offer of ours, they gladly accepted. I thought how much I would have loved to have been at the meeting when they decided who they were going to send to us to become the font of all
We were having a problem with porn. It wasn’t that we weren’t getting enough of it – we were making seizures every few days. The quandary we had was that, when the cases hit the magistrates’ court, they were giving out minimal fines regardless of the different types of material. So we set up a meeting with the local magistrates to see what the problem was.
Now, the local magistrates were rather aged and that was the first problem. Their experience of the varied content of pornography was rather limited. Just like the myth that the reason there was no law against lesbianism was because Queen Victoria refused to believe that there was such a thing so the law was limited to male homosexuality in order to get royal assent, so it was with our local bench: they believed that the only pornography available was the standard male/female vanilla missionary kind. We had to think of a way to open their eyes – preferably without stopping their hearts.
The second problem that we had was the chap who was the head of the magistrates. He was the squire of some large estate and when sitting in court he would, believe it or not, always wear a white suit and monocle. He looked like a cross between the Man from Del Monte and a Nazi scientist. Which must have been bloody terrifying for those that were up in front of him. That terrifying effect didn’t last long for pornography-smuggling offences, as chances were that he would hand out only a £50 fine and a slap on the wrist. Amazingly, he did pretty much the same for drug smugglers.
But should you appear for an offence that involved illegal activity in something in which he took an interest – such as hunting, shooting or fishing (or knobbing the downstairs staff, probably) – then he would reach for his black cap and try to bring back hanging. If he had been on the bench 200 years ago, he would have been transporting people to Australia for not doffing their cap to him. So that was what we were up against when we had to bring the magistrates into the present day, and fast.
What we urgently needed to do was list all the offences involving pornographic material, plus explain about the trusty old Customs Consolidation Act 1876 (the law that enabled us to seize the goods). So we got together and invented what we called the porno tick sheet. This required a Customs officer to sit through a whole film and tick off each sexual act as it happened. The poor bastard. You can imagine the stampede for this duty.
This form, the porno tick sheet, would then make up the prosecution package and the magistrates could compare the tick sheet to the detailed description of the act that we provided to all the local magistrates. We wrote it in our best and most detached medical language so as not to excite the old magistrates too much and push too many of them into an early grave – the risk of the male members having to be buried sideways in their coffins because of rigor mortis issues leading to difficulties in closing the lid was a very tempting outcome to aim for, but we managed to resist going for it.
Our final push for the modernization of the magistrates’ porno education was to invite one of them to the airport to view a sample of the videos we often seized; this would hopefully make them the local court expert on pornography. This offer of ours, they gladly accepted. I thought how much I would have loved to have been at the meeting when they decided who they were going to send to us to become the font of all
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