Two Court Cases

Recently I read reports of two court cases involving assault and bodily harm, there is nothing really to connect these other than the fact that, while surfing randomly, I just happened to read them in quick succession.


Case 1
I could only find a Daily Mail report for this one, which admittedly is far from ideal, but presumably even the Mail has to get the facts of the case correct, whatever they intend to do with them.

In the UK, a Cambridge graduate earning upwards of Stg90,000 a year was brought to court for assaulting his wife. He ended up there after he branded her with an iron, although on other occasions he had cut her badly with a knife and beaten her the old-fashioned way. After the iron incident she was so traumatised, she had to be subpoenaed to give evidence in court. The court fined him two thousand pounds. Apparently the judge felt that, given the provocation for the assault hinged on the circumstance of him living with his wife and this was no longer the case, that no useful purpose would be served by sending him to prison, or indeed giving him a suspended sentence. The judge also felt that community service would be unfair given the long hours the accused worked.


Case 2
And I can't find a decent newspaper report for this one at all because my stupid uni doesn't subscribe to American broadsheets. So it's mostly from this blog here.


In the States, in August a group of seven African-American (what are described as lesbian-identified) women were walking down the street heading for a night out. Some randomer propositioned one of them and received the expected response. He followed them down the street hurling insults and abuse. Eventually, they turned and faced him, where he spat on one of them and threw a lit cigarette. It devolved into a physical confrontation, and at one point where he was either throttling one of the women or repeatedly banging her head off the ground, (depending on which report you read) another woman drew a steak knife she keeps in her bag. Two other men joined in to help(?) the women and one of them ended up stabbing the original man in the abdomen. There is CCTV footage for most of this, it is not reliant on witness testimony alone. One way or another neither of these men ended up in court but the women did. Four of the women were sentenced to between three and a half and eleven years for injuring the propositioner.


That is all.