1/14/2024 0 Comments Serial streaker mark roberts![]() The result is that the only person in the country who actually wants to wander naked around the streets of Winchester is also the only man in the country who commits a crime by doing so. As far as I am aware nobody else is subject to a similar order. So the only way that Mr Gough can be reliably jugged is to tailor him, as it were, a bespoke ASBO. This offence however, is only triable in the Magistrates Court and cannot be punished by a sentence of imprisonment. “ … threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour … within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby ….” Mr Gough has in the past been charged under S.5 of the Public Order Act 1986, which makes it an offence to use: Prosecutors are too canny to charge Mr Gough with these offences, not least because there are defences to them and they fear that he would be acquitted. It can be an offence to cause a public nuisance and “ 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. It is an offence under S.66 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 to expose ones 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 is not, in itself, unlawful to go naked in public. When he refused PC Moody arrested him and took him back into custody. On emerging from the grim gates of Winchester Prison, wearing only a pair of boots and carrying his belongings in a pair of HM Prison plastic bags, he was met by Police Constable Moody who was equipped with a tracksuit and charged with a task that has eluded all previous law enforcement officers for the last decade: to persuade the Rambler to put on at least the bottoms. His latest crime was committed as soon as he was released from his last sentence. Gough has spent most of the last 8 years in prison. The only exceptions are that he is allowed to go naked in a changing room, on a nudist beach or for a medical examination. They have persuaded a court to impose an indefinite anti-social behaviour order, or ASBO, on him, which means that he commits a criminal offence if he does not wear his clothes in public. ![]() His obsessiveness is matched by the determination of Hampshire Police and Wessex CPS who have been relentless and very successful in their attempts to ensure that the sensitive residents of Winchester are not caused any distress by the sight of Mr Gough’s private parts. Mr Gough is a strange obsessive, whose determination never to wear clothes has apparently even alienated him from his own children. Well I apologise for doing so again because there are of course any number of more important issues, except to him. Regular readers of barristerblogger may recall that I have previously written rather sympathetically about Stephen Gough the booted and bearded ex-Marine, better known as “The Naked Rambler.” Who has just been gaoled for another two and a half years. ![]()
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