It Must be Marching Season

[red hander]

He'll be forever known as Jim  'The Sanitiser' Allister

[David McKeown]

Cheers David. Insightful as always. Last question for the day on this - given the above why are people on 3-figure convictions given "one last chance" by magistrates? Given your above answer surely a line has to be drawn somewhere.

When I read the Armagh Gazette it's the same names every few weeks (you'll no doubt be familiar with some of the characters!) and numbers like 109 previous convictions are not unusual.

What's the answer for these people as jail obviously isnt a deterrent and support services arent working or available? Im sure they are all a combination of mental health/substance abuse cases but something is very wrong and the taxpayer continues to fund the bill for these people. If you know the answer I'll vote for you 😑

There is no answer unfortunately and it's a judgement call. I don't know the statistics but I'd be sure that a huge majority of cases that appear in court are not the only case that defendant faced in their life time. So how do you deal with that?  Hard to know. It costs about £80k a year to house a prisoner. It costs nearly £1k to see whether probation would be suitable and/or useful for a person.

The evidence is that short sentences don't work. In fact there's legislation going through in England at the minute that the presumption will now be if the sentence is 12 months or less it should be suspended.

To answer your question each case is judged individually 109 convictions could be someone with a record for doing the same thing and no disposal works or it could be someone with 80 road traffic infractions which in reality may be 10 cases. So it's impossible to say why Judges give one final chance because it will come down to a wide variety things.

Severity of the offence, impact on other family members, genuine sympathy to the defendants circumstances, shortness of custodial sentence available etc etc. 

[Rossfan]

Judge to rule on latest case "next week"
Meanwhile the OO who are so concerned about the law are holding un notified (illegal) parades all over the place

You couldn't make it up.