Aberdeen Sheriff Court

You go here if you've been in trouble with the police and if you have to go as a witness or for your children. You also go here to pay your fines.

My tweets were political rhetoric - not a "threat" nor a "crime"!
I'M ON TRIAL FOR MY @PETERDOW TWEETS
Trial date - Aberdeen Sheriff Court, 23rd February 2016.
The tweets I posted on my @peterdow Twitter account in July 2014, two months before the Scottish independence referendum, employed republican political rhetoric to try to express in the strongest possible terms my political support -
* for a republic to replace the kingdom and
* for an elected president to replace the monarch as head of state.

I link from my @peterdow Twitter account to my Scottish National Standard Bearer website at SCOT. TK where I dutifully explain the reasons why the people of Scotland would do better, be safer and be more prosperous, if we exercise our political right to establish a Scottish republic.

None of my tweets were literal "threats" or literally "threatening" that I or anyone else could, would or should "threaten" the Queen.

My tweets were no more "a threat" to the Queen than Alex Salmond's "hold Westminster's feet to the fire" was a "threat" to anyone in Westminster. The police didn't arrest Salmond for making criminal "threats" for the same reason as the police shouldn't have arrested me.

Politicians and political authors alike sometimes use rhetorical language. In my tweets I have employed rhetoric such as figures of speech, hyperbole, brevitas and synecdoche and such tweets cannot reasonably be interpreted literally.

My scientific opinion is that it was stupidity and ignorance on the part of police detectives, prosecutors and sheriffs who read my tweets and quoted them as their poor excuse -
* to seek a sheriff's warrant to incite police officers to force entry to my home, search it and take my property
* to break my front door down, as the police did, on 27th July 2014
* to arrest me, to charge me and to hold me in a police cell overnight,
* to ransack my flat from top to bottom, damaging my property in the process,
* to seize my computer and my memory devices holding my irreplaceable science research and development data
* to refuse to return my property even when it is not needed as "evidence" to "prove" anything because I admit the @peterdow tweets were mine
* to impose in Aberdeen Sheriff Court oppressive bail conditions requiring me not to access the website of SCOT. TK or social media, with the threat that bail would be withdrawn and I would be imprisoned until trial - and that's a real threat of police and prison officer violence against me
* to terrorize me from posting about my political views on social media, which at that time would have been increasingly about the campaign for the Scottish independence referendum, supporting a "YES" vote
* to trump up a criminal charge in respect of my social media posts
* to proceed to a unfair trial in Aberdeen Sheriff Court initially due on 4th of November (now the trial date has been moved to 23rd February 2016)

I frankly and openly admit to owning the @peterdow Twitter account and I've offered to delete any of the complained-about tweets which the police or prosecutors would otherwise take action over because no tweet is worth the loss of liberty and property which the police and prosecutors have terrorized me with.

Although I am not a lawyer, it seems to me that all this unjustified police state violence and threats which I have suffered is in violation of my human rights in law under these articles of the European Convention of Human Rights -

Article 5 - liberty and security
Article 6 - fair trial
Article 8 - privacy
Article 9 - conscience and religion
Article 10 - expression
Article 11 - association
Article 13 - effective remedy
Article 14 - discrimination

Peter Dow is a Scottish scientist and a republican socialist whose legal human rights are cruelly violated by the police and courts in Aberdeen, where he lives.

Peter Dow's political defence blog publishes the truth about the wrongful and unjust royalist arrests, prosecutions, convictions and punishments he endures.
PETER-DOW. BLOGSPOT. CO. UK

amazing

Andrew Smith is a top class lawyer who appears in Aberdeen Sheriff Court. Smart and well prepared, he always represents his clients to a high standard.