Talk:Sexual Offences Act 1967

message: Should be a link to the law this repealed, the Labouchere Amendment. Someone else can decide best place for it.
Philcrbk (talk) 17:25, 7 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: "Link needed"

message: It seems to me that a serious phrasing error was made when the law was first drafted. It is the same error that computer science students are repeatedly warned about in their first year of programming. The errror is called hard coding a constant and is, say, when they code "3.14159" rather than "pi". If the law had said the age of majority rather than 21 a lot of misery would have been avoided.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.220.25.93 (talk) 21:42, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  A "Programming Error"? 

message: Guardian- Peter Tatchall research Any use to anyone? --ClemRutter (talk) 07:36, 23 May 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Parking a reference

message: I believe the statement " Jenkins himself had had homosexual relationships." requires a reference to validate.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.231.190.6 (talk) 10:17, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Roy Jenkins 

message: I have deleted the assertion in the main Article that same-sex sexual activity in an hotel room was not decriminalised by the SOA 1967. It was an assertion which was often made by law reform campaigners  prior to the passing of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. It was a potentially useful slogan, but it was not borne out by reality. As a gay solicitor who sometimes advised those who were being prosecuted for offences, it seemed to me an unhelpful assertion, as it discouraged some who might have had a good defence to charges from pleading "not guilty". (The cases that I heard of were not cases where the couple were in a hotel room, but where the police were prosecuting eg for sex in a quiet part of a park at night: those accused might well have had a defence - see below).
As early as the Court of Appeal decision in R v Reakes (1974) Crim LR 615 it was no longer tenable to continue to make the assertion that same-sex sexual activity was legal only if it took place in a private dwelling, and if the two participants were either the sole occupants or their activities took place behind a locked door. The Court of Appeal approved the following direction given to the jury by the trial judge, to determine the issue of whether an act was "in private":
"You look at all the surrounding circumstances, the time of night, the nature of the place including such matters as lighting and you consider further the likelihood of a third person coming upon the scene." 
This became the classic, approved direction for a judge to give a jury when privacy was at issue. In practice any judge hearing a case where privacy was at issue would give this direction, to be "fireproof" in the event of an appeal. 
In the Reakes case, the sexual act took place in an enclosed unlit private yard at 1.00 a.m. The yard gave access to a lavatory, the use of which was shared by three businesses. The jury decided that the act had not taken place "in private". The Court of Appeal said that the jury had been given the correct direction on this, and upheld the conviction. Nevertheless the implication of the approval of the direction was that, if there was a reasonable expectation of being undisturbed, same-sex sexual activity would not be an offence.
I am not aware of any reported case of a conviction of two men for having consensual sexual activity in a hotel room during the period 1967 - 2003. The most that one could say was that, prior to the passing of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, it was occasionally difficult to be absolutely sure that sex would be classed as taking place "in private". Ultimately, it would always be a question of fact to be determined by the magistrates or a jury. (So if "in private" was likely to be an issue, most lawyers recommended taking the matter to the jury in Crown Court!) The only absolute clarity on the privacy issue in the SOA 1967 was its provision that sexual activity that took place in a lavatory to which the public had admission could never be considered to be "in private".Ntmr (talk) 14:07, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sex in hotels, and the requirement of "in private"