Man Pleads Guilty to Harassment - Avoids Prison

Case study summary

Our client was a successful engineer. A difficult personal circumstance had led to him acting out of character and sending abusive text messages. We convinced the court that this was an exceptional case and the court agreed to pass a low sentence: a fine.

Case study

We were instructed to represent a man who had spent over 10 years building a successful career in engineering.

He had been going through a breakdown in his relationship during coronavirus, his mental health spiralled, and he had started to abuse alcohol. He then began a brief relationship with a woman he met in a support group. Clearly, this was a relationship between two people who were severely struggling and were not in a position to have a positive relationship.

The relationship became toxic and the pair argued frequently. On one occasion, our client accepts that he, regretfully, responded by sending a series of abusive messages. These threatened to expose their relationship to the women’s employer, husband and children. Our client was very remorseful for his actions.

The woman complained to the police and our client realised that his career was at risk. Therefore, he instructed our specialist criminal defence lawyers to represent him.

When passing sentence for these offences the court have set sentencing guidelines that they follow and it is rare for the court to deviate from them. There were some elements of this offence which made it more serious, such as it being committed in a domestic context and the impact this had on the complainant’s family. The guidelines stated that the courts should sentence to the client to, at the lowest, a high level community order and, at the highest, 26 weeks in prison.

A high level community order would have involved hundreds of hours of community service. Given our client’s demanding job and his poor mental health, this would have made his personal situation much worse. At court, our expert in-house advocate convinced the court to go outside of the normal guidelines and pass a fine. He used a combination of well-prepared material on our clients mental health, character references, and exemplary good character.

Our client was very relived and paid the fine immediately. He was able to move past this difficult point in his life without a community order hanging over him for months.