Oops, warrent = warrant.
Richard Gere’s arrest warrant outrages legal experts
27 Apr, 2007 0015hrs IST
JAIPUR/NEW DELHI: A Jaipur additional chief judicial magistrate on Thursday ordered the arrest of Hollywood actor Richard Gere for landing a peck on the cheeks of Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty, triggering an outrage among the country’s top legal experts who called it a “cheap publicity stunt” that bordered on “judicial indecency”.
The magistrate, Dinesh Gupta, reacting to a private complaint filed by advocate Poonam Chand Bhandari, watched a CD of an AIDS awareness function in Delhi at which Gere hugged and gave Shilpa a peck, as shown by a TV channel, to pronounce that the act was “sexually erotic” and “indecent”.
Former attorney-general Soli Sorabjee, who is one of the most respected legal luminaries of the country, took little time to describe Gupta’s ruling as reminiscent of the “Taliban moral police”.
Finding flaws in Gupta’s ruling, other top legal experts too called it yet another instance of “hounding orders on frivolous complaints”. They said the Indian judiciary would become a laughing stock in the world and urged the high court to take suo motu notice of the order and quash it.
“Judicial magistrates should not behave like Taliban moral police,” said Sorabjee. He said the magistrate, acting on an attention-grabbing complaint, had completely overlooked the “clear distinction between obscenity and vulgarity.”
“The order is totally unsustainable and makes us look ridiculous,” he said. Senior advocates Mukul Rohtagi, K T S Tulsi and Dushyant Dave felt the public peck at the AIDS awareness programme was not an act to deprave the morality of the nation. While Rohtagi felt that the magistrate was “trigger-happy”, Dave termed the order as an act of “judicial indecency”. Tulsi said,”The issuance of arrest warrant is contrary to all judicial norms. A consensual kiss between two adults can never be said to be an offence.”
Magistrate Gupta found the episode objectionable and in violation of sections 294 and 34 of the Indian Penal Code(IPC). Section 294 says:
“Whoever to the annoyance of others does any obscene act in any public place shall be punished with imprisonment of three months or with a fine or both.”
Nutjob : )