Markus Meechan, AKA Count Dankula. Image CC-BY-SA 30 extracted from video by Bunty King.

Yesterday morning, I reported on and supported the appeal fundraiser set up by Markus Meechan, AKA Count Dankula. He was asking for £100,000. Seeing the importance of the issues at hand, supporters fully funded that goal in a day. At the time of writing he is currently over £140,000. This is gonna be a gold-plated, diamond-encrusted appeal.

Dankula has been convicted and fined for the absurd crime of making a comedy video in which he sets out to annoy his girlfriend by training her dog to make Nazi salutes in relation to Nazi phrases. The scene is reminiscent of a Monty Python sketch and to be brutally honest I never found Monty Python that funny. Even the dead parrot sketch.

However, I would never expect the police to rock up to someone’s home for a poor taste joke. There have been hundreds of comedians making Nazi jokes over the years. Remember, “‘Allo ‘Allo!”? The involvement of the criminal law in a bad taste joke is deeply sinister, and has been condemned by many including Ricky Gervais, the Independent and the Spectator. I set out some of the legal issues in my previous article.

All that said – a hearing in Sheriff’s court in Scotland is roughly the same as a hearing before a district judge in a magistrate’s court in England. An appeal would usually cost a few thousand pounds. With this budget he had better have the best Queen’s Counsel in Scotland and buy them a golden wig.

Markus Meechan, AKA Count Dankula. Image CC-BY-SA 3.0 extracted from video by Bunty King.

On 23rd April 2018 Markus Meechan, better known as Count Dankula, was sentenced to a fine of £800 for the publication of a YouTube video. In the video he had trained his girlfriend’s dog to raise its paw in what was meant to be a Nazi salute.

The case raises serious issues of free speech. I have to say when I go looking for comedy, I do not go looking for people training dogs to salute Hitler. I had never heard of Dankula until this controversy. Having said that, I do sometimes go looking for Monty Python. Remember the corpse eating sketch? The Life of Brian? Or what about this sketch by Stewart Lee and Richard Herring?

Should we really be criminalising bad taste jokes? Even the left-leaning Independent and other major publications like the Spectator say no.

The question that prompted this article though, from several people, is – can Dankula appeal? He has a GoFundme seeking appeal funds here and has raised £70,000 at the time of writing. I suspect that he will exceed his target by the end of the day. Readers may wish to contribute. Will he succeed? Is it worth it?

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