I love the Criminal Code, pt. n+1
Posted by MoreCoffeePlease on 09 Jul 2008 at 02:42 pm | Tagged as: Current Events
From today’s majors:
Gary Lynch, 45, of Toronto, is charged with:
1) Prowling by Night, (prowling on the property of another person near a dwelling-house)
2) Attempt Break and Enter,
3) Mischief under $5,000.
Prowling by Night! What a most excellent charge. I do still regret the lack of Grand Mischief as a charge, however.
That is excellent. When I was a kid in North Toronto a few houses got broken into in the middle of the night. I heard about it from the neighbours’ mother who was telling someone that there had been a Prowler. I couldn’t picture what on earth a Prowler could possibly look like… but it sounded very, very sinister (and oddly cat-like).
When I was also an impressionable age, people were sometimes mentioned as having been charged with uttering, which sounded both important and completely mysterious.
I had always thought that Prowling at Night was one of those Victorian common law offences that got codified in the original 19th c. Code and has been hanging around like deadwood ever since… but apparently not: apparently the offence was enacted relatively recently (post-WW2) in response to a restrictive court interpretation of some other offence (like maybe trespass, or something of the sort… I forget).