The news that Gayle Newland has been jailed for eight years after tricking her friend into having sex with her by pretending to be a boy has been met with incredulity by some people and satisfaction by others.
It’s been an incredibly divisive case for those people paying attention to it – and thanks to the live nature of how reporters cover court cases nowadays that’s a lot of people.
Lawyers who were involved in what has become known as the fake penis case have already remarked how unusual it was and that’s something of an understatement.
File photo dated 09/09/15 of Gayle Newland, who will be sentenced today after she duped a female friend into having sex by pretending to be a man
But leaving aside the bizarre nature of her offending and whatever you think of her or her victim’s character, as they emerged from the evidence in the trial, the fact remains she was found guilty by a jury.
That’s 12 men and women drawn from the Chester area who are just like you and me – and just like the people posting on the ECHO’s Facebook page or tweeting the case.
They found her guilty of three charges of sexual assault after hearing all the evidence.
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Once that happened no matter what the judge’s personal opinion may have been his job then became to sentence her according to laws created by Parliament, using sentencing guidelines handed down to him.
Judges often take a lot of flack on social media or in the papers when people don’t like their sentences, either because they’re too high or too low, but increasingly their hands are becoming more tied than they have ever been.
The eight year jail term which Judge Roger Dutton handed down is the starting point for a category two seriousness, category A culpabliity case of sexual assault which this case fits squarely into.
In other words he went right down the line according to the sentencing guidelines, although he could have reduced it to as low as five years or as high as thirteen years.
But to do either there would have had to have been specific evidence to justify that alteration.
Photo issued by Cheshire Police of Gayle Newland, who has been jailed for 8 years after she duped her female friend into having sex by pretending to be a man for two years. Photo by Cheshire Police/PA Wire
In fact the judge thought there were more aggravating factors than mitigating ones, meaning if anything he would have increased the sentence but said as an “aspect of mercy” he was not going to do that.
Gayle Newland’s barrister Nigel Power QC tried to persuade the judge that this was a case where he could take an “exceptional course” and depart from the sentencing guidelines but, despite a lot of psychiatric evidence on her behalf, the judge was not convinced and handed out the sentence that he did.
For her to have avoided a jail term he would have had to have reduced her sentence to a maximum of two years in order to be able to suspend it. Given the seriousness of the charges that was always going to be an incredibly unlikely scenario.
If you want to see the judge’s thought process in his own words click here.
Source: http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/