Ricardo: According to the judge and prosecutor in this case, possession of an illegal firearm in the UK is a strict liability crime, so no mens rea required.Like statutory rape in many places.

OK, at the risk of sounding silly…suppose a male experiences an “unprovocked” erection while asleep and an underage female mounts him, can he be found guilty of the “strict liability” crime of statutory rape? Or, he is awake but thinks he is having relations with the older woman who was in the room in bed with him before the lights were turned off and he went to the bathroom? (I am aware that in some places the male will be found guilty of statutory rape even if he truly believed that the girl was beyond the age of consent.) That would be very strict liability, about as strict as convicting someone for bringing the gun they found in their yard to the police station to turn it over.

You can stream the episode for free.

How about fire hazmat teams? A first responder gets out his kitty litter and swabs to contain an illegal toxic spill. As soon as he sweeps them up, he’s arrested and charged with environmental crimes against humanity.

A heart surgeon is arrested for possession of illegal contraband organs, in the middle of surgery. After all, he had someone else’s heart literally in his hands.

I bet if a Brit soldier fell on a grenade in Afghanistan to save his colleagues, he’d be posthumously scrubbed from the service for illegal posession of an explosive device, attempted murder, and soiling his uniform. Talk about conduct unbecoming!

jccamp: Many posters obviously did not believe what the defendant claimed — that he found the shotgun and was turning it in — and further, that his actions, even if believed, represented a threat to innocent persons.

Considering the fact that he was arrested at the police station after having produced said shotgun in front of a police officer, this makes no sense. Do people believe instead that he went to the police station carrying the shotgun to complain about a noisy neighbor and that the shotgun fell out of his jacket while filing the complaint? The second possibility — that the gun actually belonged to him and he wanted to turn it in to absolve himself of responsibility for illegal possession — is at least plausible. Thanks to the UK’s laws, the prosecution never had to actually prove this theory in court, though.

Frankly, the message that Crown Prosecution Service is sending is that if you find a shotgun in your backyard, chuck it over the fence and let someone else deal with it. Surely a great lesson in responsible citizenship.

That there was no intent didn’t matter in the least.

I was also criminally charged as a juvenile and sent to a pre-trial diversion program for possession of a weapon on a school campus. Keep in mind, this was BEFORE columbine, had it been after, I would have most likely gone to jail.

http://www.constitution.org/2ll/bardwell/bieder_v_us.txt

Not sure if this helps–it’s the opposite of what you’re looking for, but would support an argument that the practice of what you’re seeking doesn’t make sense, according to some courts.

I took the meaning to be that the defendant had been seen or otherwise discovered by someone with the weapon in his possession, so he dreamed up a story to explain such, as opposed to pitching the thing into a river and denying it ever touched his hands. Something like that.

As for your first, no, of course not, a reasonable person wouldn’t leave it lying about, but then, a reasonable person would probably call the police as soon as practical and tell them what he had found, instead of waiting, keeping it in his house, and carrying the thing into the stationhouse and handing it over. Doesn’t this guy watch CSI?

Took it to the receiving desk at the police station and had no problem.

Maybe it depends on the IQ of the cops.

the proper response would have been to call the cops and ask them to respond to retrieve the shotgun.

That’s OK if it’s in your yard, perhaps, but if you see it in the public park, you should leave it for kids to find while you walk to a distant pay phone? Also, if he had, what’s to stop them from still charging him?

There appears to be a minority that thinks the defendant feared he would be somehow connected to the shotgun, and was turning it in to deflect suspicion away from himself, if and when the shotgun was determined to be involved in some other crime.

Given the choice between encouraging crooks to bring crime guns to the station, where the police can ask lots of awkward questions if desired, and encouraging them to toss the gun in the river (or over someone else’s garden wall), I think the first offers some advantages. I also don’t think many crooks will try to bring in the murder weapon to try to deflect suspicion, but maybe I don’t think like a crook :-)

The defendant stood accused of beating up a male parking meter enforcement person with a broom handle in 2007, but beat those charges when the judge refused to allow the Crown to amend the charges to a lower inclusive when trial testimony about the meter-reader’s injuries could not establish the higher level of assault/battery.

The lesson here may be a cautionary rebuke for taking a newspaper article at face value, as difficult as that may be to believe.

I own some modern pellet guns, and do not take them lightly. But I still stand by my “good grief”.

Did I read your excerpt correctly that this was a pellet gun? Good grief…

Prof. Orr, I think,said that there is only an implicit exception for police possession of illegal objects. Is that right? If so, it seems a prosecutor could get revenge on a police department by going after it for possession of weapons, drugs, burglar tools, etc.

Recently in England a soldier was prosecuted for turning in a firearm he found in the alley behind his house. To make it worse, the prosecutors completely believe his story, they just don’t care.

“The intention of anybody possessing a firearm is irrelevant.”

CBS) PLAINFIELD, Ill. A 13-year-old Plainfield boy and his parents are stunned and outraged after the teen found a gun in school and turned it in to authorities, who then expelled him.

CBS 2′s Dana Kozlov reports Ryan Morgan’s parents and supporters attended the school board meeting Wednesday evening to try to fight the expulsion. They believe the punishment, and the subsequent alternative school option, are not the proper responses to a mistake made by a teenage boy.

Ryan Morgan, 13, says he pocketed a pellet gun he and a friend found in their school’s bathroom to keep people safe. Morgan’s mother says a short time later Morgan gave the gun to the Troy Middle School assistant principal.

“I told him maybe that wasn’t the best decision, to remove that gun, but it did lead to you finding the culprit, he was arrested and to put my son in alternative school — he has no behavior problems,” Audrey Morgan, Ryan’s mother, said.

The Morgans say there was no reasoning with the principal or with the school superintendent.

“He said, ‘The board can give your son full two-year expulsion, I’m asking you not to go before them,’” Audrey Morgan said.

They went anyway, saying they had nothing to lose, only to see the meeting minutes already recommend expulsion.

Roy Morgan says he can’t accept that, but accepts his son’s decision.

“He said ‘I’m going to turn this in’ and you know what, I commend my son for making that decision. It was the right decision,” he said.

School board officials issued a statement Wednesday night saying due to confidentiality reasons they can’t discuss the specifics of this case, but that “purposeful possession of weapons is a serious offense and deserves careful consideration by the administration and the school board.”

For example, this fact basic pattern came up in a very recent case before the D.C. Court of Appeals (the District’s equivalent of state Supreme Court, not the D.C. Circuit) in an opinion that has an interesting holding post-Heller – i.e., that Heller should be applied retroactively, and requires a remand to see if the defendant might have qualified for a D.C. firearms license that would have been impossible to get prior to the 2008 Supreme Court Second Amendment decision.

The facts, however, aren’t atypical: The police responded to investigate a report of an armed person banging on a door, and encountered the defendant, who matched the description given in the 911 call. After initial noncompliance with police orders and furtive gestures by the defendant, the police did a Terry frisk and discovered a handgun in the defendant’s pocket. He claimed to have just found it and intended to turn it in to police. He testified at trial in his own defense that:

he “found a revolver on the ground on the passenger side [of his car].” He did not own a gun and he had never seen the one on the ground. He picked up the revolver and noticed that it did not have any bullets. He carried one television into his home and “stuck the gun in his pocket after [he] got inside [his] house.” He intended to take the gun to the police station; he did not call the police, even though he had a cell phone, because he planned to go out again and “drop [the gun] off at the police station.” He decided to go to the mailbox in front of his home, and when he turned away from the mailbox, he “saw two officers walking towards [him] with their gun[s] out.”

Plummer v. United States No. 04-CF-857 (D.C. Court of Appeals, Nov. 12, 2009), slip op at 9-10. The defendant was convicted in a jury trial of what was in essence simple possession of an unlicensed firearm. I’m not entirely sure from the opinion how the Constitutional inquiry on remand and the facts mesh, since given the tendered defense at trial, the license issue doesn’t seem terribly relevant.

Ricardo: According to the judge and prosecutor in this case, possession of an illegal firearm in the UK is a strict liability crime, so no mens rea required. Like statutory rape in many places.

So all I have to do to punish an enemy in Great Britain is to sneak an illegal weapon into his home, then anonomously report him or her to the police?

One wonders if principal Hill allows baseball or softball games with aluminum or wooden bats.

At least some some principals apparently do.

(OK, that’s a generalization – but it’s my understanding of the basic axioms.)

Eventually they started to remodel their bargain house and found a package that had been plastered into the wall. They called the police and were arrested for possession. I think it was cocaine. I also seem to remember the prosecutor eventually let them go for obvious reasons.

The obvious web searches have turned up nothing on the case.

At least they’re not being paid to keep the children in foster care until they are unadoptable.

He was arrested for unlicensed possession of a firearm, convicted after a jury trial,…

The jury had the deliberative power to decide otherwise. Once the general populace has bought into this whole nutty notion then even a reasonable man must begin to act not as a reasonable man, but as a jury of his peers might potentially like him to act.
The offshoot of this is that the police are going to get a lot more calls reporting mysterious bags, boxes, and other containers or objects, most quite ordinary and containing ordinary things, that one cannot risk personally opening lest one meet the standard of possession of contraband.