Our thanks to FP for this piece in the Metro. The start of the piece:
A woman has been jailed for a year after lying to police – and causing an innocent man to spend five months behind bars.
Hayley Carter’s lies were revealed when a friend filmed her at a New Year’s Eve party admitting the man she had helped to incriminate was innocent.
Pretty 23-year-old Carter, a switchboard operator, made a police statement which led to a man being charged with possessing a stolen shotgun and with handling stolen property in Crawley, West Sussex.
The fake statement also caused the Crown Prosecution Service to drop a case against another suspect.
Carter’s lies were exposed at the innocent man’s trial last year – where she failed to appear as a witness…
Carter was first given an 18-month community order which included 240 hours of unpaid community work and a £1,500 fine.
But the Court of Appeal decided Carter’s sentence was unduly lenient and she will instead face a year in prison.
At the end of the piece, some comedy (in the final paragraph):
Sussex Police’s Detective Sergeant Jon Robeson said: ‘Carter’s action caused a man to be in prison for five months awaiting trial, and also had the effect of causing the original case against the first man to be called into question so that it had to be withdrawn.’
He added: ‘The sentence sends the message that attempts to pervert the course of justice are taken very seriously and that people who make false statements to the police – and to the courts – must expect to face justice themselves.’
Holding women to account for perverting the course of justice is so vanishingly rare, that I doubt this case will even register with all the women who know they are above the law, simply on the grounds of their sex.
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