The 'Naked Rambler' - question on freedoms

Edan wrote: So, this guy has been in prison multiple times for basically being naked while hiking.

Should we accept people 'getting upset' by this kind of thing and deal with him because of it, or tell the offended people to get over it?
Thoughts?

Warning: Spoiler!

My client Stephen Gough, a former Royal Marine better known as the Naked Rambler, has now been in prison, largely in a segregation unit, for the best part of nine years.

Once the remission rules are taken into account, that is the equivalent of a sentence of nearly 18 years. It is about what you would expect to get if you committed a rape of an eight year old child. By my very rough calculations the cost of imprisoning him, ignoring altogether legal and police costs, has been about £330,000. His offence has been that he won't wear clothes in public.

Who is being the most ridiculous here: Mr Gough, or the Crown Prosecution Service?

It is seldom advisable for barristers to make any public comment on the rightness of a client's cause. If it were done regularly it would become expected, and a barrister's failure to voice an opinion in support of his client would then be taken as a lack of enthusiasm. Only because we are not expected to reveal our opinions can we represent the bad just as strongly as the good.

So it is with considerable hesitation that I am moved to comment on the Court of Appeal's decision yesterday. The Court rejected Gough's appeal against his latest conviction - a two and a half year sentence for breaching an anti-social behaviour order, or Asbo, which required him to wear at least a loincloth whenever he is in a public place. His crime was committed when he emerged from prison naked, whereupon he was immediately greeted by two police officers charged with the faintly absurd task of either making him wear trousers or arresting him.

Of the judgment itself there is little to be said. There was an irony in the fact that even as Lady Justice Rafferty ruled that the Crown Court judge had been correct to exclude a naked man from participation in a Crown Court trial, a live video of that same naked man sitting behind a desk in Winchester Prison was being prominently displayed in the Court of Appeal. At one point he even leant back in his chair, unwittingly displaying for an illicit moment a flash of the organs that the law has expended so much money, court room time, prison space and legal brainpower in keeping concealed.

The problem is not with the court that upheld his conviction and sentence yesterday. It is with an Asbo that turns an eccentric into a criminal, and a prosecution system that could easily turn a blind eye, but which prefers instead to try to break the will of a harmless and astonishingly courageous man.

Remember: it is not, in itself, unlawful to go naked in public. It is an offence under section 66 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 to expose one's genitals with intent that someone should thereby be caused “alarm or distress" – but nobody has ever suggested that Mr Gough had such an intent.

It can be an offence to cause a public nuisance and to “harm the morals of the public or their comfort, or obstruct the public in the enjoyment of their rights”. But as an earlier and more successful nudist, Vincent Bethell, showed in 2001, juries are reluctant to find that merely being naked in the street does anything of the sort.

Mr Gough could have been charged with the same offence but, as Hampshire prosecutors no doubt realised, that would have required them to persuade a jury that his nakedness had “harmed the morals of the public.” Since there was no evidence that it had done so – although some people objected to the sight of him wandering around the streets of Eastleigh – a jury would have been likely to acquit. They could have achieved and did secure a few convictions in the Magistrates' Courts for minor public order offences, but these were too trivial in themselves to put him behind bars.

Entire article here

It is an offence under section 66 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 to expose one's genitals with intent that someone should thereby be caused “alarm or distress

On second though, maybe I would need a cover, as my "beauty" may cause alarm and distress...

At the very least, nausea...