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In English criminal law, public nuisance is a class of common law offence in which the injury, loss or damage is suffered by the local community as a whole rather than by individual victims. ==Discussion== The nuisance action began in twelfth century England as a criminal writ, belonging only to the Crown. It was used in cases that involved encroachments upon the King’s land or the blocking of public roads or waterways. The King sought to punish these criminal infringements, commonly known as “purprestures,” through criminal proceedings. Over time, activities prosecuted as public nuisances included everything from embezzling public funds to having a tiger pen next to a highway, from assisting a homicidal maniac to escape to placing a mutilated corpse on a doorstep, and from selling rotten meat to “subdividing houses to the point where they become ‘overpestered’ with the poor.” As these examples demonstrate, early authority to commence public nuisance actions was derived from the sovereign’s “police power."〔(Public Nuisance: A Historical Discussion )〕 Spencer (1989 at 59) describes the offence as, "...a rag-bag of odds and ends which we should nowadays call 'public welfare offences'".〔Spencer, J. R. (1989). "Public Nuisance - A Critical Examination". ''Cambridge Law Journal'' 55.〕 But the common feature of the crime is that members of the public suffer a common injury through interference with rights which they enjoy as citizens. The modern definition is found in paras 31-40 Archbold (2005): In ''Attorney General v PYA Quarries Ltd.'' (1957) 2 QB 169〔(Attorney-General v PYA Quarries Ltd ) () EWCA Civ 1 (15 March 1958)〕 the issue was whether quarrying activities—which showered the neighbourhood with stones and splinters, and caused dust and vibrations—were a private nuisance affecting some of the residents (which would have been civil), but not a public nuisance affecting all Her Majesty's liege subjects living in the area. In his judgment Romer LJ concluded at p 184: Denning LJ. agreed at p 191 In ''R v Madden'' (1975) 1 WLR 1379 the defendant telephoned a bomb hoax to a steel works whose business was disrupted for about an hour. James LJ. accepted that hoax telephone calls falsely asserting the presence of explosives could amount to an offence of public nuisance but the few employees whose day was disrupted were not a sufficiently wide class of the public. But in ''R v Norbury'' (1978) Crim. LR 435 the defendant made 605 obscene telephone calls to 494 different women over a period of four years. This repetitive behaviour over a long period, intended to cause offence and alarm, was held the kind of behaviour which the public has an interest in condemning. This is not without its problems because each telephone call lacks the element of common injury. As a comparison, the cases of ''R v Ruffell'' (1991) 13 Cr. App. R. (S) 204 and ''R v Shorrock'' (1994) QB 279 involved the prosecution of the organisers of "acid house" parties at night in fields adjacent to residential accommodation with liability confirmed because they knew, or ought to have known, that there was a real risk of creating the sort of nuisance that in fact occurred. At each party there was major traffic disruption and the noise of music, with clean-up operations required the following day. While ''R v Ong'' (2001) 1 Cr. App. R. (S) 404 involved a betting scam in which the floodlights at a Premier Division football match between Charlton Athletic and Liverpool were to be sabotaged which was inherently dangerous to the thousands within the ground. In ''R v Soul'' (1980) 70 Cr. App. R. 295 a group who agreed to secure the unlawful release of a restricted Broadmoor patient was convicted of conspiracy to effect a public nuisance. The court seems to have assumed that the public would have been exposed to danger had the plan been put into effect. That the Crown had failed to prove any actual danger or common injury was not considered (see the critical commentary at (1980) Crim. LR 234 suggesting that the courts were improperly reintroducing "public mischief" into the law despite the ruling by the House of Lords in ''R v Withers'' (1975) AC 842). Similarly, in ''R v Millward'' (1986) 8 Cr. App R(S) 209 the defendant made hundreds of telephone calls (636 in a single day) to a young woman police officer with whom he had become infatuated, at the police station where she worked. As to the requirement of common injury, Glidewell LJ, said: In ''R v Johnson (Anthony)'' (1997) 1 WLR 367, the Court of Appeal confronted the problem head-on. The defendant had made hundreds of obscene telephone calls to at least thirteen women. The defence argued each telephone call was a single isolated act to an individual. Tucker J, rejected the argument at pp370–371: This was followed in a number of cases such as ''R v Holliday and Leboutillier'' (2004) EWCA Crim 1847〔(R v Holliday and Leboutillier ) () EWCA Crim 1847〕 in which two animal liberation activists made a large number of telephone calls to employees and shareholders of certain companies whose activities the appellants opposed. The calls were designed to jam the company telephone switchboards, and some of them were threatening and intimidating. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「public nuisance」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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