A court summons issued against Reginald D Hunter has been quashed in the UK after a judge said Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) misled him when bringing a private prosecution against the comedian.<\/p>\n
District judge Michael Snow said the group\u2019s motive in seeking to prosecute Mr Hunter was \u201cto have him cancelled\u201d and ruled the prosecution \u201cabusive\u201d.<\/p>\n
He said CAA had \u201cdemonstrated by the misleading and partial way in which it summarised its application and its wilful, repeated failure to meet its disclosure obligations that its true and sole motive in seeking to prosecute RH is to have him cancelled. I have no doubt that the prosecution is abusive.\u201d<\/p>\n
The US stand-up comedian had been accused of three counts of sending an offensive communication on three occasions \u2013 on August 24th, September 10th and 11th last year \u2013 to Heidi Bachram on social media. A summons was issued in the case. <\/p>\n
But after an application from the defence, the judge said CAA had sought to use the criminal justice system for \u201cimproper reasons\u201d and that he would have refused to issue the summons had all the information been laid before him.<\/p>\n
In a judgment delivered at Westminster magistrates court on Tuesday, he said CAA was \u201cseeking to use the criminal justice system, in this case for improper reasons\u201d.<\/p>\n
The judge said a summary of Mr Bachram\u2019s tweeting in the application case summary was \u201cwholly inadequate\u201d.<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cIt did not reveal the extent of her tweets directed against Reginald Hunter in the period immediately preceding the complaints (her tweets were sent between 15 August and 11 September 2024). The summary misled me into believing that his comments were addressed to her involvement with the Jewish faith as opposed to his response to attempts that were being made to have him \u2018cancelled\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr Hunter\u2019s lawyer Rebecca Chalkley KC told the hearing on Tuesday that \u201cvery little was disclosed\u201d to the court and the \u201clack of candour\u201d meant the summons should be quashed.<\/p>\n
She told the judge: \u201cYou were led to believe in papers in front of you that the CAA was no more than a charity, that it had no history \u2013 as since demonstrated \u2013 as a vexatious litigant, no complaints, no criticism in parliament.\u201d <\/p>\n
She accused the CAA of \u201cusing the courts for their own political agenda\u201d.<\/p>\n
The CAA\u2019s prosecutor Donal Lawler told the hearing that the charity had complied with its duty of candour. \u2013 Guardian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A court summons issued against Reginald D Hunter has been quashed in the UK after a judge said…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":208519,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[93,61,60,303],"class_list":["post-208518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-united-kingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208518\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/208519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}