Our thanks to Keith for this. An extract:
A troubled binge-drinking mum has been banned from all pubs after she attacked two women at Teesside bars. Michelle Mackenzie, 41, could not remember breaking a woman’s jaw with one punch after drinking almost a litre of vodka.
Teesside’s top judge did not jail her yesterday, not wanting to punish her three children for her crimes.
The real culprit behind this story is, predictably, a man. Another extract:
Despite knowing what she was capable of, he (the male judge) said, she did not learn her lesson and did exactly the same thing weeks later.
He added: “I’ve taken into account that I’m told, and accept, that for many years you’ve been the subject of domestic violence.
“That of course explains a lot.
It would be interesting to know if the judge had the slightest evidence to believe what he’d been ‘told’. For all we know from this article, she could have been primarily a perpetrator of domestic violence, who sometimes came off worse in fights with her partner.
If the charged party had been a man, who’d been the victim of domestic violence over many years at the hands of a woman, would a judge have said, ‘That of course explains a lot’, and handed him a suspended sentence? Ha.
In declaring he didn’t want to punish the woman’s children for her crimes, the judge essentially told her what she probably already knew – what all women in the UK must know, by now – that she wouldn’t serve an appropriate punishment for her crimes (in this case, a prison sentence).