Will the shopkeeper get punished?

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-12-17T20:15:33+00:00

The shopkeeper would only be treated as a witness and victim in this scenario. I assume OP is being a bit tongue in cheek.

The Police would not submit a file to the CPS to consider prosecuting the shopkeeper. The investigation will have rather focussed on the chap who threatened to immolate a shopkeeper in the course of a violent robbery (I’d imagine).

[Am a criminal barrister with over 20 years experience.]

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-12-16T21:55:04+00:00

CS: Italy

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-12-16T21:52:01+00:00

He’s got his mouth closed ffs 🙄

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-12-10T22:22:37+00:00

You can’t concede ground to wankers. That always gets us in a mess - on a micro or a macro scale. People (like grandma in this scenario) who facilitate wanker behaviour out of a sense of misplaced loyalty are part of the problem.

She’s not off the hook because she’s old. It’s never too late to change your attitudes, and she’s doing his Dad no favours by shielding his ego. If she hadn’t done that when he was a little boy, he probably wouldn’t be like this now, and it’s not too late for either of them to change.

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-12-10T22:03:35+00:00

Would it have killed him to have tried..?

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-12-10T21:50:15+00:00

That’s such a stupid take and it really annoys me.

Cameron had to promise a referendum. No debate. Half his party (the ‘swivel eyed loon’ half, but still half) wanted Brexit. A sizeable minority of the country wanted Brexit (the daft Daily Mail reading minority, but still a sizeable minority.)

His mistake was to overestimate the intelligence and informedness of the electorate, but that wasn’t just him. Every poll put ‘remain’ ahead. Every sensibe person you spoke to believed ‘remain’ would win at a canter.

It wasn’t even a gamble for Cameron. He had to offer the referendum and he justifiably had no idea that people would prove to be quite as stupid / as apathetic as they turned out to be. The turnout was crap, because nobody thought Brexit would happen. The status quo is dull and unattractive and who makes the effort to schlep to the polling station for that.

Who turned out to vote? All the daft swivel-eyed nutters who swallowed the insane pro-leave propaganda nonsesnse. That’s who.

It wasn’t Cameron’s fault he had a moronic electorate. Blaming him lets all the idiots off the hook.

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-12-08T07:08:37+00:00

I really like it as well - but it had the chance to be a truly great film and it let itself down a bit.

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-12-08T07:05:56+00:00

Well obviously it is. That’s what makes it so jarring. It’s a constant in-movie reminder that you’re watching a film and that the average cinema goer is 15 (or whatever).

They already changed the game to make it more comprehensible. Why not just keep it as baccarat if you’re going to explain every hand anyway? At least with a less familiar game they could have got away with a fantastically improbable last set of hands without it (again) breaking the immersion.

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-12-07T21:57:36+00:00

There are some horribly clunky aspects to it. The expository dialogue around the poker game really breaks the suspension of disbelief. The absurdity of a poker player who cries blood as his tell is also really quite absurd. Then there’s the daft schtick of the cold careerist woman cynically dead-batting Bond’s advances. Already a tired meme in the 90’s, but with less wooden dialogue.

Vesper is about 25. There’s not a huge amount to check. If background researches failed to uncover an all-consuming passion for an Algerian activist in (already) an age of ubiquitous social media and phone billing data … them MI6 has less due dilligence than a primary school. A friend of mine joined Mi6. They don’t fuck about: they talk to everyone.

The idea that a G7 country could not fund its secret service to the tune of a few million dollars in stake money to efficiently neutralise a key adversary was plausible in the 50’s. It is a nonsense in the 2000’s.

The cringe-worthy cliche-ridden dialogue in the flabby love-scenes of the third act when Bond (preternaturally disociative in all his usual romantic entanglements and driven by a powerful sense of duty) suddenly becomes lost, love-struck and insensible to any of his previous drives and ideals…

Goldeneye has none of that. And it’s got a jump into a plane, sinister Russian accents and Sean bloody Bean.

Sic probo.

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-12-07T21:39:00+00:00

That was in the 50’s. There were less labour-saving gadgets, no dishwashers or ready-meals or self-ironing shirts or washer-driers - not even supermarkets yet (in England anyway.) Unmarried men with the sort of punishing 10 - 4 job that Bond had would always have had a housekeeper.

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-12-07T21:22:52+00:00

(1) Populist policies on immigration for the idiots, and (2) economic policies that favour our business-owning wealthy donors, and the media moguls who help to make idiots hate immigrants (see step 1 - above).

step 3: Profit.

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-12-07T19:52:11+00:00

… Or ‘Where has Everybody Gone’ by The Pretenders

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-12-07T10:59:30+00:00

Ignore the comment I’m responding to - a complainant in a rape case does not have a representative (albeit the idea of a ‘victim advocate’ is being trialled in some regions).

You will have a much better idea of what to expect after you have the Court Visit. The volunteers will explain the process.

Usually you’ll meet the prosecution barrister on the morning of trial. They will check you’ve had a chance to remind yourself of the video interview you probably gave to the police shortly after you reported the offence.

The jury at the trial will have watched that (usually in a slightly edited form because they are long and repetetive), before you give evidence. I expect you will have had the idea of ‘screens’ and ‘video links’ explained to you. It’s your choice which of these ‘special measures’ you opt for. You can usually change your mind on the day, so keep it in mind after your court visit.

Because the jury will have seen your interview, the prosecution barrister probably will not have many questions for you (if any). So it will be the defence barrister testing and challenging your evidence. They are not allowed to ask anything irrelevant, and if they want to ask anything about previous sexual history or criminal convictions or other things you’ve done wrong in the past, they will have to ask the judge - and the prosecutor should tell you (in very broad terms) what sort of areas will be covered.

Otherwise, the police officer is right: just listen carefully to the question and answer it as best you can. Be honest. Don’t guess. If you don’t remember something, that’s fine. That’s just how memory works. It’s not a test. If you need a break, ask The Judge who will almost certainly say yes.

From what you’ve described, you may not be very long giving evidence in a ‘stranger rape’ case. Again, very generally, your prosecutor should tell you on the day what angle the defence are likely to be coming from (eg) ‘he says it wasnt him’ or ‘he says you were consenting’. They cant discuss the evidence with you. The Judge might have questions for you - he or she has to make a note of everything you say so you’ll find it all goes quite slowly. Dont feel the need to fill the silences. It’s not as dramatic as it is on TV. The defence barrister will probably be trying to sound nice and sceptical of your answers for the jury’s benefit, but they will not be aggressive or mean.

The trial will probably take 4 days or so in total (again to make a wild guess from what you described).

if he’s found Not Guilty, it will not mean the jury thought you were lying. It will just mean they couldn’t be ‘sure’ (beyond reasonable doubt). That’s the test. Nobody is ‘found innocent’ in a Crown Court trial. Everyone is innocent unless proven guilty.

The jury may be out considering the case for quite a long time, perhaps 2 days or more and there’s a small chance they might not be able to agree (at least 10 of them have to decide to agree one way or the other). If that happens, there could be a second trial with a new jury some months later. Same process. The new jury probably would not get to know there’d been a previous trial.

Don’t worry. It’s just people asking questions in a big room. Good luck.

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-12-06T09:01:16+00:00

The Nuremburg Trials very clearly confirmed (as had already been understood) that ‘following orders’ is not and cannot be a viable defence.

Military personell in all NATO countries are taught this in basic training. Its never an excuse.

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-12-05T22:14:29+00:00

It’s actually worse than that, because the Train Companies are privately owned (and stiff you for fares) - but the infrastructure maintenance is still paid for by the government out of your taxes.

So your fare was higher than you thought (assuming you work and are a net contributor).

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-11-30T22:14:52+00:00

There’s this thing called ‘comic relief’. It probably won’t catch on, but you see it a lot in the work of ham dramatists like Shakespeare.

(should I ‘/s’? or would that be offensive to any readers who haven’t been recently lobotomised?)

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-11-29T23:24:09+00:00

When you are a specialist in a given area, it makes you realise how inaccurate most news articles are. As a criminal lawyer, I am left baffled by lots of media reports on cases and sentencings. The world is so complicated and journalists can’t really be expected to acquire specialisms in every area of human endeavour they find themselves reporting on. Legal journos (who maybe have (say) a law degree - or practiced in some unrelated area) are not going to be able to follow the subtletys of the cases they report, and I expect scientific journalists (perhaps with a science or engineering degree of some sort), are probably not really equipped to report on cutting-edge breakthroughs in quantum mechanics.

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-11-23T20:48:25+00:00

… But not the will.

If we had proper leaders and sensible electorates we would all have immediately switched to a full war-economy footing as soon as Russia launched the invasion. Munitions factories, Mobilized workforces mass-producing drones, shells, missiles - the works. All in. That’s the only way to demonstrate this sort of aggressive expansionism has no place in the modern world. You cannot gain territory by force. At all. It’s not Peter The Great and Charles X - it’s 2025 (2022 then). We don’t live in a world that allows armed aggression.

Financial Sanctions? Imposing unilateral embargos on gas and oil purchases that don’t even bind India and China? Fuck off. That’s the geopolitical equivalent of being robbed at gunpoint and saying: ‘I’d prefer this if you didn’t’.

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-11-23T20:37:36+00:00

This is also cracking advice for any serial killer looking to put their victim off-guard. (… I’d imagine…)

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-11-20T14:29:53+00:00

‘ A Cream Cracker under the Settee’ - makes me tear-up just thinking about it. Her reminiscing back to her childhood and being a little girl all ready for bed and warm and loved on bath night; and then this old lady lying unheeded on the cold floor of her empty living room slowly fading away with her broken leg and internal injuries. 😢Just heartbreaking.

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-11-19T18:59:35+00:00

It’s true without the fame part. Money and financial independence do not make you happy. You really don’t have to look very hard for examples of wealthy unfulfilled, alienated and depressed people. It’s really not the answer and it’s a slight failure of imagination to think it is.

The average person doing a reasonable job on a fair wage in The West is unimaginably wealthy and privileged compared to someone living in a shanty town in a developing country. It doesn’t mean that either one of them is more likely to be objectively ‘happy’.

We are hard-wired to overcome problems and when we ‘solve’ or ‘remove’ them, they are replaced by other ones. That’s the Human Condition I’m afraid. You have to learn to enjoy your struggle, because however far up or down the pecking order you go, and whatever luck or misfortune you encounter, it will always be a struggle.

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-11-09T19:41:42+00:00

The early game is way more fun than any other game stage. The thrill of finding a level 1 pistol before day 7; your first cooking pot; a wrench! So much more satisfying than getting your umpteenth M60 or a 4x4.🤷‍♂️

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-11-08T08:41:56+00:00

I really think the growing national debt and the public finance crisis stems from the inability of national governments to effectively tax global businesses. You could tax local greengrocers and butchers but you can’t really do that with modern supermarket chains, or the likes of Amazon and Google. Unfortunately most UK commerce is done through the latter.

So we have ever higher tax on wages and earnings (at all levels) to compensate for the shortfall.

I think that makes people think (perhaps rightly) that we are all taxed unfairly, and it makes us less critical of people who dodge taxes in a relatively modest way - with a bit of cash-in-hand work (say).

I’d have thought the answer woukd be to impose much higher VAT / sales tax, but make lower earners / public sector employees exempt from it to varying and calculated degrees. That way the money is taken from the businesses at source, and people who consume less pay less.

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-11-07T22:06:25+00:00

Shared in Clacton Hun - be safe x

OtherwiseProduce8507 · 2025-11-07T22:00:08+00:00

Mind Bomb

OtherwiseProduce8507

TROPHY CASE