something in the talk of mass murder after all." The Bertie Wooster character in the Jeeves novels by P. G. Wodehouse frequently enters a nolle prosequi when refusing to do something another character is asking him to do. In 1982, a prosecution concerning the play The Romans in Britain by Howard Brenton collapsed after it was demonstrated that what a witness had thought was an erect penis shown on stage during a male rape scene was in fact an actor's thumb. The case had been brought at the urging of the morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse, who had not seen the play; it was ended with a nolle prosequi. In 2004, rape charges against basketball player Kobe Bryant were dropped after the complainant refused to testify. In 2011, as a result of his death, charges against Osama bin Laden were dropped with the filing of a nolle prosequi in a Manhattan federal court by the U.S. Department of Justice. In 2019, subsequent to the Boston straight pride parade, a justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court held that a notice of nolle prosequi could not be denied by a judge. Notice of nolle prosequi was found to be within the prosecutor's right to exercise judgment and manage limited resources. "[The trial court judge's] effort to do so violated the Commonwealth's constitutional rights." While on trial for corruption in September 2022, former South African president Jacob Zuma brought a private prosecution against the state prosecutor in his corruption trial, Billy Downer, and a journalist covering the case, Karyn Maughan. Zuma accused Downer of leaking private information to Maughan, a charge which both denied as they said the information was in the public domain. Zuma received a nolle prosequi as the Director of Public Prosecutions did not believe an offence had been committed. Both Downer and Maughan applied to High Court for the case to be dismissed before trial. In December 2022, Zuma relied on the same nolle prosequi to bring a private prosecution against his successor Cyril Ramaphosa, accusing him of being an accessory after the fact to Downer and Maughan's alleged actions. The status of this nolle prosequi was contested as there was a dispute whether a nolle prosqui obtained in one case could be applied to another. In January 2023, the Johannesburg High Court stayed the prosecution of Ramaphosa until a later date when a court could consider the validity