I'm surprised you did not link to this "Court of Public Opinion" piece from the same UK Telegraph site,

It appears that although 150 women found the man on the spot not to their taste and demonstrated so both publicaly and physically it was he who was arrested and draged away...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/9855652/...

The odd thing though is that even though the man did not measure up to the 150 womens expectations and that there had been a fair old physical melay many of the women still said they had a good time. They sound like a tough crowd "down in the valleys" so I'll put that part of the UK on my "do not visit list".

Jury nullifying the law only for one case strikes me as something not really compatible with "fairness" or "justice".

If you happen to trip a spam filter, adding your e-mail address can sometimes prompt the blog to recognize you as someone who's commented before and let you through. This only applies if you've already used an e-mail address for previous comments. If you used a fake one, that works just as well.

Anyway. The shills in the crowd pervert justice; Athenian democracy was manipulated by the golden-tongued orators; the mob runs rampant with it is unleashed.

The principle of the court of law stands against this reality: the idea that it will inquire into the truth, without officers of the court being bribed. It's a system that had to be forged out of corruption to prevent corruption. That it is subject to issues is only human; that it exists in the West as it does is a very good thing. It will have to change to handle the extant corruption, as courts have had to do over the past centuries.

And that is all right.

The original quote from Anatole France, as it is usually rendered in English: "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

Yeah right in France we have a saying: "neither the rich or the poor have the right to sleep under a bridge".
Which means that the law themselves favour the rich, so as courts are meant to judge according to the laws..

That it was a massive sadist orgy in which quite a few ordinary people perished. The details are too nauseating to repeat here, but it pays to remember that the Divine Marquis himself was an active participant in the atrocities. Oh, and it got France into the state of permanent decay punctuated with more revolutions (thankfully, none as bloody as the first one), and it is going downhill even now.

So, should we consider advertising a way that corporations seek to circumvent, replace or supplement the legal process too?

This anonymous post exposes techniques for dilution, misdirection and control of this Court of Public Opinion. It pretends to list some methods used in real world by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO ...

Interestingly, http://cryptome.org/2012/07/... pretends that this document was censored by slashdot.

(And this blog forces me to give my e-mail address to accept this comment.)

There's no expert opinion in the public court. There's no search for truth or justice. Very rarely is there even reasoned debate. Often the public court gets half the story (if that). The entire process often has a huge bias in that different groups will gravitate to different parts of the public court. Most of the time, lots of people with the same mindset will get together, all complain, launch meaningless campaigns, and then be terribly surprised that nobody else has heard of their cause (or often cares).

The 'public court' is just lashing out based on existing prejudices, often with no understanding of the actual topic, usually starting with a sense (justifiable or not) of being wronged. This is pretty much how politics & winning votes started, no? That and mob rule.

'We have found a witch, may we burn her?' - who is asking, and who is being asked? Really ugly mobs don't wait to ask - they hang people from trees or riot in the streets. More tempered mobs deferred inevitably to some authority figure. Today the same principles seem to have crossed over into snide remarks on forums and gossip that is the modern equivalent of discussions at the club, and the lowering of 'social standing', along with the occasional Internet-based marching with placards. Our Internet 'authority figures' are often just opinionated bloggers, and plenty of them have been found to have manipulated facts in their favour.

Society created courts & police for a reason. We don't trust our mobs or our elite, and for good reason I think. Sooner or later, someone has to go 'woah, lets' find out what really happened, shall we?'.

It's never going to be perfect, because it's a human system, but I would still have a lot more expectation of getting some money back by taking a dishonest builder to court than by outing them on Twitter (even if I did both). Not every court battle is about the elite vs the weak, remember.

And I'd argue the Internet has actually made this sort of thing harder. When the mass media consists of a handful of wire services and TV networks, or of just the king's heralds, or travelling bards, then you've only got to get your message into one channel to make it significant. The Internet is a zillion tiny little channels, which any given person can only pay attention to a few of.

And, to really make things happen through extrajudicial means, you don't necessarily need to gather a mob at all, just a sufficient portion of the elite. In less technological times, this could mean only having to spread your message at one particular club, lodge, salon, court, or whatever where the influential people were. Now, the elite is a larger percentage of society.
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But there is still an elite involved; it's the people who are tech-savvy, literate, and fluent in whatever language is relevant to a particular case. Their-- our, for most people reading this-- concerns are what gets noticed, their friends are the ones who will get special treatment, and their values are the ones that will be enforced. It's especially ironic to keep seeing the Aaron Swartz case brought up as an example of a powerless person being bullied by the powerful, when the reason it's gotten so much attention is that he had connections at the highest levels of the Internet elite.

The court of public opinion is like any other vigilante justice; as often punishing the innocent as the guilty.

-"In any state if any clown
decides that now's the time to fight
for some ideal he thinks is right
and if a million more agree
there ain't no Great Society"
(Frank Zappa - Trouble Every Day)

Only by using critical thinking can we avoid bias, but bias gets ratings and advertising that leads to more followers and money.