Client who Breached Suspended Sentence Avoids Prison

Case study summary

Our client had previously been given a suspended sentence by the court, which required him to take part in unpaid work. He had been summoned to court after failing to compete this work. We persuaded the court that our client should be given another chance.

Case study

We were approached by a man who had previously been given a suspended sentence by the court. This meant he had a prison sentence hanging over his head and that, if he committed any further offences or failed to keep the requirements of the suspended sentence he could be sent to prison for 8 months.

The client had been summonsed back to court by the probation service after he failed to attend two appointments and did not provide a reasonable excuse for failing to attend. This was the second time the client had breached the order, after previously being fined for doing so. The probation service were now pushing for the client to be sent to prison and they did not want him to be given another chance. Our client knew that he was at a high risk of being sent to prison so he instructed our specialist criminal lawyers to represent him.

Our client fully accepted that he had been breached this order. However, he explained that he was trying to rebuild his life and had taken on a new job with long hours and was struggling to cope with this alongside his unpaid work.

Our aim was to persuade the court that, whilst our client was in the wrong, he had missed his unpaid work only as a result of attempting to put right the previous mistakes he had made. The client was wrong to put other commitments over his unpaid work but did have good intentions when doing so.

After preparing the case, we instructed an expert barrister to present this argument in court.

The court were convinced that our client should be given another chance to complete his unpaid work. They added an extra five activity days to his sentence to reflect the breach of the order.

Our client was very relieved that he can carry on re-building his life.