In April 2012, Liam Stacey, a student from Swansea University, was jailed for 56 days having been found guilty of incitement to racial hatred. He had posted offensive comments on Twitter about Bolton Wanderers’ football player, Fabrice Muamba, who had suffered a sudden cardiac arrest and had collapsed during the match against Tottenham Hotspurs on 17 March 2012. Sentencing him, Justice Wyn Williams said that his comments had been extremely racist and offensive.
This crime comes within the remit of the Communications Act of 2003 (section 127), which states that it is against the law to send messages electronically when they are ‘grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or false’. In Stacey’s case the message would have been seen as causing ‘gross offence’ even if Muamba had not received it. ‘The offence is one of sending, so it is committed when the sending takes place’ and Muamba had become a celebrity victim of cyberbullying.
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