Talk:Offences Against the Person Act 1861

What categories does this belong in? Josh Parris#: 12:04, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

I was going to put it into Criminal law when it is finished since its only significance is as a listing of the offences on a single page to support separate pages describing the substantive offences. It is possible that it also has some historical significance if we reimport some of the repealed offences and enlarge upon their contemporary relevance to the Victorians. David91 15:12, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Help please

I think I have correctly identified which sections are still in force and which are repealed but I am without all my reference books of old so can someone please consult Halsbury to verify my attributions. I have moved the text of the abortion provision into the UK abortion page but hesitated to transfer the bigamy provision because that would put it on the polygamy page. Anyway, I am now bored with this task and leave it to all of you to finish it off. The repealed sections are all at Offences Against The Person Act 1861 (repealed) David91 05:51, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Sections that have been repealed/changed/added may, however, not correspond in the UK and in Ireland, the other successor state to the then United Kingdom. Do we need another article on "Offences Against the Person Act 1861 (Republic of Ireland)" to reflect the divergence after 1922? It is still a "big" act in Ireland (and our favourite hot potato) because it is the current abortion legislation.--Dub8lad1 00:57, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Spelling

Why does an article about a British Law contain American spellings in the text, i.e. "misdemeanor"? Is the suggestion that those the wrote the document in Victorian Britain used American-English? Or (more plausibly) has this text been deliberately mangled from it's original form into illiterate Americanese?! Clearly, Americans would be pretty quick to leap on any Brit correcting any of the "English" on articles pertaining to America; therefore it's reasonable to demand the same treatment of British articles. More to the point, it's a fraud to quote a text and change the spelling. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.112.89.214 (talk) 23:25, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Hi: No, the old English spelling was adopted by America. It is us Brits that have changed the spelling!

Offences Against The Person Act 1861

The Old Bailey 1678

Ron Barker (talk) 13:56, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

Homosexual offences

I have moved the following material to this page because it is outside of the scope of this article:

Buggery between heterosexuals ceased to be an offence in 1994. The age of consent to homosexual buggery and to certain other homosexual acts was reduced by the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000 from 18 to 16 years in England and Wales. Almost all sexual offences are today contained in the Sexual Offences Act 2003. —Preceding unsigned comment added by James500 (talk • contribs) 16:06, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Sexual offences

The Sexual Offences section needs to be reviewed as much of it has been superseded by the Sexual Offences Act 2003.

Malcolm.boura (talk) 19:59, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

This is explained in the section relating to sexual offences. Details of repeals and the replacement of provisions by other Acts (chiefly the 1956 Act) are given if you look closely. This article is suppossed to be a description of the 1861 Act, not the present law on sexual offences. It would help me if you could tell me what you think is wrong with the section. James500 (talk) 20:17, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Child stealing

Just watched a repeat of an old Upstairs, Downstairs episode where Mrs Bridges was charged under the Offences against young persons act 1861 - so it seems they got the year right, having come here to check if this was accurate. I assume it's under the 'Child stealing' section as in the article. Probably too trivial to mention in the article proper however.--Tuzapicabit (talk) 03:54, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

Note

This Act was adopted in New Zealand in 1866, according to Abortion in New Zealand. James500 (talk) 00:39, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

Note

List of repeals and amendments in the Republic of Ireland [1] James500 (talk) 15:23, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Cut from section 4

I have cut the following passage as it is plainly wrong.

Abdullah el-Faisal, a radical Muslim cleric who preached in the UK until imprisoned for stirring up hatred, was in 2003 the first person convicted under this Act in more than a century.

Firstly, annual convictions for all offences under the Offences against the Person Act 1861 have been very high ever since the thing was passed, as it still contains the main offences of non-fatal violence. For statistics, for example, see report number 218 of the Law Commission which was published in 1992, and consultation paper number 122 (gives the number of cases under ss 18, 20 and 47 tried on indictment in 1988 as 17,167), both available as a pdfs from BAILII.

Secondly, if this claim is supossed, despite its literal meaning, to refer specifically to convictions under section 4 of that Act (the offence of soliciting to murder), there was a conviction in R v Shephard [1919] 2 KB 125, 14 Cr App R 26, CCA, and that is only 84 years, not more than a century. That case is mentioned in the 1999 edition of Archold. I don't have time to go on a trawl through statistics but the suggestion that there have been no convictions under section 4 for long periods of time is not believable.

A claim like this should be sourced from statistics from the Home Office, published in a command paper, or perhaps Hansard, not the Jamaica Observer or a book that is only marginally related to the subject, as they are not reliable sources. [I forgot to sign this post. James500 (talk) 15:37, 11 September 2011 (UTC)]

I have had a look at the official statistics for 1999 and 2000. When I looked at the "small print" at the end on page 256 of the PDF, I found that unfortunately they are not collecting separate statistics for section 4, but are instead grouping soliciting to murder together with conspiracy to murder (Criminal Law Act 1977, s 1), making threats to kill (section 16 of the 1861 Act) and certain cases of assisting an offender (Criminal Law Act 1967, s 4) under the misleading heading of "threat or conspiracy to murder", which makes it impossible to determine how many people were convicted under section 4 and might be the reason why these claims are being made. James500 (talk) 15:30, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

And see this conviction reported by the BBC on 21 December 2001. That is over a year earlier and the article does not suggest that this is an unusual occurrance. James500 (talk) 22:27, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

That was alot of information to digest. But I actually still think reference to Faisal may be warranted, as he is specifically mentioned by the Joint Committee on Human Rights as "worth noting" in the context of Section 59 of the Terrorism Act 2000 and similar restrictions on speech:

• Joint Committee on Human Rights, Parliament of the United Kingdom (2005). Counter-Terrorism Policy And Human Rights: Terrorism Bill and related matters: Oral and Written Evidence. Counter-Terrorism Policy And Human Rights: Terrorism Bill and related matters. Vol. 2. The Stationery Office. p. 114.

Int21h (talk) 22:49, 8 March 2013 (UTC)