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.
