LONDON. The British justice system faces a fresh administrative crisis after American broadcaster Megyn Kelly described Russell Brand’s prison sentence as a political witch hunt and a furious West Texas farmer offered to solve the matter with a seven-day statute of limitations.
Kelly called the sentence an “outrage” following Brand’s conviction for one rape and three sexual assaults. Elon Musk had already called the prospective punishment “Unjust”, a contribution requiring fewer letters than most British parking fines. Enter Clyde “Straight Row” Mercer, who farms cotton near Levelland and believes the Atlantic Ocean is no reason for standards of evidence to become optional.
Megyn Kelly Meets the Seven-Day Legal Warranty
“You can’t suddenly rape somebody thirty years ago,” Mercer declared. “What can happen is that an allegation is made today about an act thirty years back. That’s not the same thing. I would like somebody to explain how they test that evidence before they decide the case is either a conspiracy or a national religious awakening.”
Mercer then proposed a one-week statute of limitations for rape, sending the Home Office into an eight-month consultation on whether Saturday counts. Officials were said, in this entirely satirical scenario, to prefer the established British system in which the deadline for filing a complaint about a pothole is yesterday while the deadline for repairing it is the heat death of the universe.
Asked whether seven days was absurdly short, Mercer replied that he had never received an agricultural subsidy payment in under six months and was therefore open to negotiation. “One week was the opening offer,” he said. “My actual complaint is that everybody has a verdict before anybody can explain the evidence.”
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The Crown Prosecution Service confirms there is no time limit for prosecuting rape, although old cases can present evidential difficulties. In Brand’s trial, jurors convicted on four counts and acquitted on three. The events underlying the convictions occurred between 2004 and 2009, rather than thirty years ago as Mercer’s rhetorical tractor of a comparison suggested.
The court’s published sentencing remarks set out the judge’s reasoning for a ten-year-and-six-month sentence. Mercer called this “a useful discovery: the paperwork exists, and you can read it without shouting at your phone”.
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Kelly argued that Brand’s prosecution was politically motivated. Mercer, who is conservative enough to consider most government departments a crop disease, was nevertheless unimpressed by the claim that a defendant’s political branding automatically defeats a jury verdict.
“If it’s a witch hunt, tell us who arranged it and what proof you’ve got,” he said. “Don’t just point at a broom and say it’s government property. I can oppose the state without joining every celebrity’s defence committee.”
Brand denied wrongdoing. The jury’s divided verdict, however, supplied something the online argument had overlooked: the possibility that seven separate allegations might require seven separate judgments rather than a single screaming headline.
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Mercer’s proposal has not reached Parliament. A departmental working group is nevertheless imagined to have requested three years to define “day”, another year to find the minutes, and a public inquiry into how a man from Texas found a functioning calendar in Britain.
The farmer returned home satisfied that Britain could be criticised without inventing what happened in court. “Russell Brand can be an asshat without that being a crime,” he said. “Rape is a crime. A fair hearing is a right. Three statements. They don’t cancel one another.”
Across the Atlantic, read Mercer’s Farm.FM column on the one-week idea and Bohiney.com’s account of Elon Musk’s one-word legal brief. For facts rather than theatrical indignation, consult the Crown Prosecution Service’s sentencing statement.
