Court awards couple £10 after arrest for taking rubbish from garden

A couple were arrested and taken to court for picking up a items including a hosepipe and a shoelace abandoned in the garden of an empty house near their home. Richard Small, a bricklayer, and his wife Lynne, both 38, also loaded a pair of boots, and a plant pot into a wheelie bin.

After they took it home, four police officers turned up in a van to arrest them and take them to Hull's Priory Road police station in handcuffs.

The couple were photographed, fingerprinted, asked to take drug tests and put in the cells before being charged with "theft by taking".


Photo from here.

When the couple elected trial by jury this week the Crown Prosecution Service offered no evidence and the case was dropped at Hull Crown Court.

The judge awarded the Smalls £10 in compensation and criticised the waste of public resources in bringing the case which has cost the taxpayer almost £2,000.

Recorder Paul Isaacs said: "Whatever the rights and wrongs, it seems to me the picking up of these items in the belief that they would have been abandoned would have been accepted by a sensible jury. It should not have got as far as it did."