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Woman charged with posing as a witch

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Yowie

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Dec 9, 2009, 4:01:56 PM12/9/09
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Woman charged with posing as a witch

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/woman-charged-with-posing-as-witch/article1393710/Clearly, this is a case of simple fraud (needing tuition fees is hardly'witchcraft' of any description).Even though the defendant is not Wiccan, the law seems to discriminateagainst those who do practice Witchcraft as a religion and/or part of theirculture, and yet misses those who defraud gullible people via other types ofreligious practices (teleevangalist come to mind).If the defendant has a clever lawyer, said lawyer may well be able to showthat the defendant *genuinely* practices witchcraft (rather than'fraudulently') and therefore the charges against her are false. If she wassimply charged with fraud, variosu religious and cultural practices wouldnot have to enter the equation.Yowie--If you're paddling upstream in a canoe and a wheel falls off, how manypancakes can you fit in a doghouse? None, icecream doesn't have bones.

Baird Stafford

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Dec 9, 2009, 6:06:41 PM12/9/09
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In article <7oahhmF...@mid.individual.net>,
"Yowie" <yowie9644....@yahoo.com.au> wrote:

<snip>

> If she was simply charged with fraud, variosu religious and cultural practices

> would not have to enter the equation.

I got the sense from the last part of the article that she was *also*
charged with fraud.

That may have been due to sloppiness in reporting, though. Still,
"charged with fraud" does not mean at all the same thing as "charged
under the statute" (which would have been better phrasing if that's what
they truly meant).

Blessed be,
Baird

--
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice
there is. -Yogi Berra

Paul Hume

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Dec 21, 2009, 11:59:24 AM12/21/09
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As noted, the laws that replaced the laws against witchcraft per se
(viz. the Fraudulent Mediums Act) left in pretense of witchcraft used
to defraud as a crime. At least one of the more conservative
Austrailian states has a similar statute in place. Didn't know there
was a similar proviso in Canadian (or was in Ontario) law.

It rather sounds like throwing the book (or in this case, throwing the
bell, book, and candle), since both simple fraud and fraudulent
pretense to witchcraft can stick.

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