It shows you how softhearted we are: We actually felt sorry for David Crump, a British postman who dumped over 5,000 pieces of direct mail he was supposed to deliver. We’re all human, right?

Then his defender Anthony Randle opened his mouth.

“It came to the point where my client thought ‘What am I going to do with all this lot?” Randle said, according to the Express & Star.

Uh, did we read that correctly? Did he really say, “All this lot?’”

Apparently, and this is what he meant:

“The items that were not delivered were not letters,” Randle said, the paper continued. “They were mail shots – some people may even call it junk mail.”

Get it? In effect, he said that mail theft is excusable when the victims are marketers. And the magistrate in charge, David Godley, seemed to agree.

“There is not much more that gets people worked up than not getting their mail delivered,” he told Crump, according to the Express & Star. “The only saving thing in your favour is that it’s commercial post.” Then he hit the postman with a fine.

Why did he bother with even that mild punishment? “It may be junk mail to most households, but it’s the livelihoods of some businesses,” Godley reportedly said.

Thank you, judge, for that. But we can’t say we’re brimming with confidence in the British legal system.
Indeed, the only people deserving of praise in this case are the managers and gumshoes at Royal Mail. Suspecting Crump, they marked all mail given to him with UV pens, and later found a “mountain of mail” in supermarket recycling bins, and in “a wheelie bin” at Crump’s home, the Express & Star reported.

Don’t be smug, fellow Americans—it has happened here many times. For example, a Phoenix postman was hit with a 10-count indictment for allegedly “depositing mail into a trash bag and throwing it away rather than delivering it to the addressees.” We don’t know yet if he’ll actually draw time.

Should people be jailed for mail dumping? In theory, yes, but it’s a tough call. Two pilots overshot the Minneapolis airport by 150 miles while working on their laptops–they could have killed hundreds of people and themselves—but nobody’s suggesting they go to jail.

But we’d like to see a better attitude. Direct mail is keeping these troubled postal services alive, and the postal services know it. Too bad some of their employees (and their lawyers) don’t.