Our thanks to Keith for this good news. Extracts:
Serial offender Sharon Mincher was given a suspended sentence in July, but this was upped at London’s Appeal Court. A callous drug addict who was spared jail after she cheated an elderly man out of £40,000 today had her “too soft” sentence upped by top judges.
Sharon Mincher blackmailed the vulnerable victim , who cannot be named, over a 15-year period, threatening to falsely accuse him of rape if he did not give in to her demands.
The 45-year-old was handed a two-year suspended sentence and a drug treatment requirement at Teesside Crown Court in July, after admitting blackmail and stalking.
But her sentence has now been replaced with a five-year jail term by judges sitting at London’s Appeal Court, who said the original punishment was “unduly lenient”. The court heard Mincher, who has 184 criminal convictions to her name, [my emphasis] targeted the victim after he paid her for sex…
In one particularly spiteful incident, she went to his house three times on the day his father had died. She made him hand over £130 – completely ignoring his pleas to be left alone because he was grieving…
Locking her up today, Lady Justice Hallett said: “The judge placed too much weight on the offender’s current efforts, which were to her own benefit, to tackle her drug addiction, and too little weight on the seriousness of the offending, its duration and its impact on the victim.
“Given the link between her offending and her addiction, her efforts weren’t irrelevant and we applaud those efforts. But they could not possibly justify both a reduction in the sentence and the suspension of it.”
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