Improper, Imprudent and Important: Reflecting on Breach of the Peace after McConachie v Shanks
Author | |
DOI | 10.3366/elr.2019.0582 |
Published date | 01 September 2019 |
Date | 01 September 2019 |
Pages | 434-441 |
“[I]t didn't seem right”, one witness recalled, that when alighting from a bus sixty-five-year-old Douglas McConachie placed a ticket with his address and phone number written across it atop a gym bag rested upon the lap of a twelve-year-old boy. As the bus drew away the appellant further gestured, suggesting the boy phone him. McConachie had spent the preceding journey smiling and winking intermittently at the complainer who was left feeling “stressed and uncomfortable” as he continued the rest of his trip home from school. At first instance, McConachie was convicted of breach of the peace at common law. That conviction was quashed on appeal in the recent case of
This note supplements and extends current thinking about breach of the peace by situating
The common law offence of breach of the peace has undergone reform throughout the past two decades.
severe enough to cause alarm to ordinary people; and
threaten serious disturbance to the community.
Of note amongst the many additional observations made in
Nine years later, the full-bench decision in
Relying on
Following
Since
Seven months after delivering the opinion of the court in
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