Criminal justice act

donutface

I'm busy writing a book on a fictional character and I hope to make it as realistic as possible, I've done a certain degree of research on the matter but keep note that this is all hypothetical.

A couple of weeks ago this character happened to be getting phone spam from a certain company, and this character managed to retaliate signing up 28,000 random phone numbers to their database, not all of these numbers are valid however, but it still cost the company €4000, and the company filed a complaint with the Garda Bureau of Fraud investigation.

A week and a half later the Garda came knocking at this characters door with a search warrant and happened to take the characters laptop and took up a statement where the character admitted to doing this and apologised for the damages.

With the suggestion of the Gardai the character took a four and a half hour bus journey to Dublin and apologised to the company who then agreed to try and drop all charges and absorb the damages themselves.

Because it was over 1000 euro, the adult cautioning scheme unfortunately didnt apply to this character so the case was put forward to the director of public prosecutions who'll make a decision to prosecute or not.

Now that everything is told with certainty, here comes the questionable part.

The Gardai happened to go through the files on the characters laptop and find some other software of a malicious nature, with one of the programs which could be hypothetically used to gain a large ammount of accounts on a social networking site. The Garda promised the character not to chase him up on it but that he's concerned. In a seperate email the Gardai suggested to let them know of any other security issues that they havent spoken to the character about yet.

Proving that any of it was actually used could be extremely difficult, but admitting to it is probably proof enough. Does this character just use his right not to say anything incriminating or is it simply better for the character to admit to the bloody gloves that are in his laptop?

All of the programs except for the mobile phone spam one was written when the character was a minor, with pracitcally all of them being over a year old, some of them being 3 years old.

johnnyskeleton

This isn't really a legal question because it depends on how you want to portray your character -i.e. if he admits it he could be honest, niaeve, arrogant etc, if he denies it he could be scared, unsure, brazen or just simply following the old advice of "just say nothing".

Readers don't expect (and probably don't want) legally correct stories, so you can change the law to suit your ends to make a more gripping read. Try Arts/Creative writing for better input.

Whether the Criminal Justice Act, 2007 could be used to compell answers to questions in this case could be a moot point, as the gardai could well just use it as a way to bully a confession out of the person anyway.

By the way, if you were looking for legal advice nice try.