Because this thread started in a discussion about the United Kingdom, I think it is relevant to cite how this exact scenario did happen in the United Kingdom.
Elizabeth Kinney was arrested for a homophobic slur used privately in a text message to a third party -- not even a public comment -- against a man who physically beat her. The man served no jail time for beating her.
"The defendant and the victim in this matter had been friends but had a falling out which resulted in an incident on the October 27, 2024 whereby abusive and homophobic text messages were sent to the victim causing her alarm and distress."
Yes, the prosecutor defined the "victim" in this case as the third party receiving the text messages. They were so harmed by hearing someone who beat the defendant until she had a brain injury called a slur that the only remedy was bust into her house with a swat team to put her in a jail cell, instead of having the "victim" block and cut ties with the sender.
I didn't misrepresent the situation it all. It is exactly as I described.
11 armed people is a functional equivalent of a SWAT team. My statement was hyperbolic. If you serve someone a court summons for a bullshit charge it is a threat of violence against their person. And the charge was bullshit. And the threat of violence was followed up with force.
I'm not lying. I'm also not Christian at all! Never claimed to be.
Sorry, mixed you up with someone else in this thread.
I don't believe that 11 armed people turned up to arrest her. I've never heard of such a thing.
Edit: ok, I'm going to assume you had no idea that UK police officers are not routinely armed. Armed officers are specifically trained and only deployed when the suspect is thought to be armed. Most of those were probably IT to check computers and devices.
She pled guilty to the charge on the advice of her lawyer.
Edit 2: actually the more I read on this the less I believe. An initial contact by the police would be 2 police officers, they would knock at the door and ask to speak to you. How did they get a warrant to get in? Is this all completely bullshit?
At this point, assertions such as these are a form of ad hominem fallacy against half of society. You are discrediting the multitude of sources who have covered this story because of the nature of the speaker while no hardline liberal outlets have covered this story at all and presented a counterargument. If you want to have an alternative narrative, you need to link a major outlet showing her to be a liar. The case has been presented to the public. You don't like the people presenting the case. That doesn't invalidate the case. You must, at this point, present a member of your team making a reasonable, evidenced based deconstruction of her claims. The fact that there isn't any coverage from your side at all of this incredibly well televised and written embarrassment for the legitimacy of crown prosecutors speaks volumes.
The UK is extremely litigious in regards to libel. Her lying would be an act of public libel against the crown prosecutor. She went on TV to talk about it. It's been well covered in everything from the IB Times to The Sun to the Daily Mail (as linked above), as well as fully televised on Piers Morgan. Naturally the team you obviously root for can just refuse to cover any prosecutions which are embarrassing for them and you can simply smugly say "well it's not in any source I personally recognize as valid so it didn't happen."
You can explain it away all you want. Those sources are garbage. They pay for stories, don't confirm sources, or do anything else required of journalism. I get you may be GenZ and have been fed garbage soup your whole life about how "all news bad", but fyi there are still some publications with journalistic standards. You might as well add the National Enquirer from the US. Your sources are such sensationalist rags that they were selling attention long before the internet.
It's not ad-hominem it's ad-practices. For all you know every single one of those articles is based on the same half-baked rumor.
The source is somewhat trustable mainstream but not really good, as already the headline is wrong. The other person was not jailed for insults against the rapists, but threats of violence. And that is a attack on the state monopol of violence itself, hence the harsh sentence.
But indeed, the rulings against the rapists don't seem allright and very much out of balance with the other sentence.
It appears that the ruling regarding the rapes was not so straight forward [1], certainly not something that you can use as a one-line argument. There are also other articles describing what presumably happened there in 2020.
Regarding the case of 'Maja R.', here's a summary [2] (e.g. she didn't show up for the first two hearings [3] - that would certainly raise the anger of the righteous if somebody not in their favor did that).
I'm in doubt whether this one case is sufficient to prove the downward spiral that some people claim to perceive (it was also brought up in context of migration here on HN recently, and from the sources which I could find I‘m not sure it fully qualifies there either).
https://www.facebook.com/piersmorganuncensored/videos/elizab...
Elizabeth Kinney was arrested for a homophobic slur used privately in a text message to a third party -- not even a public comment -- against a man who physically beat her. The man served no jail time for beating her.