Drunken reveller assaulted cat Independent (IN) - Wednesday, June 27, 1990 By: ANDREW BROWN Section: Home News Page: 2 Word Count: 306

A FEAT which had been thought impossible - to make a journey on public transport at Christmas time more disgusting - has been achieved by John Smith, a London Transport labourer, who was fined pounds 500 at the Old Bailey yesterday for publicly and indecently assaulting a cat on a Tube train, writes Andrew Brown.

Warwick McKinnon, for the prosecution, said that four days before last Christmas, Smith was seen on a train with his trousers around his knees, rubbing himself against a grey-brown cat he was holding on his lap.

A woman passenger was so disgusted she immediately left the train; Smith put the cat down and pulled up his trousers. The cat walked off along the platform and disappeared, while station staff, who had also seen what happened, called the police and took Smith to the station office.

When questioned by the police he said, and repeated to the jury, that he had fallen asleep after drinking 10 pints of beer and some spirits to celebrate Christmas, and was dead to the world until woken by people shouting at him about a cat. 'What cat?' he had asked the police.

He was charged with the common law offence of 'committing an act of a lewd, obscene and disgusting nature and outraging public decency by behaving in an indecent manner with a cat to the great disgust and annoyance of diverse of Her Majesty's subjects within whose purview such an act was committed'.

Stella Reynolds, for Smith, 32, of White City Estate, west London, told an Old Bailey court: 'There have been cases involving dogs, horses, sheep and pigs but there has never been a case involving a cat.' After the verdict Miss Reynolds said Smith would almost certainly lose his job because he 'could not cope with the constant stream of jokes directed at him'.

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