A 20-year-old man from Northern Ireland has been sentenced to 100 hours of community service after sending death threats to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and London Mayor Sadiq Khan.
Matthew Burns, 19, from County Armagh, has pleaded guilty to sending Ardern a photo on March 20 (local time) of a gun with a silencer with the message: “You’re next.”
The threat was sent on Twitter, five days after the March 15 Christchurch mosque attacks.
Burns faced five charges of improper use of electronic communications, with messages of a menacing and grossly offensive nature from 14 June 2018 to 20 March 2019, the BBC reported.
The case began when New Zealand police informed Northern Irish police to the death threats Burns had made against Ardern on Twitter.
Burns also wrote about Khan and his wife on social media in December: “it would be a shame if something happened to her… like a bullet in the head and him too”.
District judge Eamonn King said the New Zealand authorities did not want Burns to be prosecuted but “spoken to”.
He said the sentence “will get you out from behind your smartphone and iPad, for you to engage with people”, the BBC reported.
“If you do not complete it, you will be brought back to court for a custodial sentence,” he added.
The Irish News reported that King said Burns had “low self-esteem”.
“In the reports presented to the court on your behalf, there are issues that give me a sense of concern.
“You have feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem,” King said.
“When you put offensive comments online you are met with a blizzard of responses and engagement. That increases your feeling of self-worth. You feel more important.
“Someone is listening to you and it increases your self-esteem, so you then say something even more outrageous and that escalates and escalates,” he said.
King opined that there should be more severe consequences for social media companies that allow such behaviour, and that they should not be allowed to self-regulate.
Newry Magistrates Court was told in April that when Burns was interviewed after being arrested, he said he had far-right political leanings and negative sentiment toward minorities, Muslims and LGBT people.
The judge rejected an application, due to a lack of medical evidence before the courts, to restrict reporting due to the defendant’s believed poor mental health and attempts at self harm, indicating a suicidal nature.
In April, Burns was released on £500 (NZ$1008) bail to the custody of his parents, with a £1000 cash surety, on condition he had no access to the internet and stuck to a curfew.
Source – stuff
