David Andrew Sullivan (24), of Rue du Pont Marquet, St Brelade, was sentenced to 160 hours’ community service and ordered to complete a 12-month probation order after a judge offered him a ‘last chance’ to stop offending.
He was also made the subject of a two-year restraining order preventing him from contacting his former partner and was ordered to pay £27 compensation to one of the victims of the assault.
Outlining the case in the Magistrate’s Court, police legal adviser Advocate Chris Baglin said that the break-in took place between 2 and 3 July at a property in St Brelade where Sullivan had been living until shortly before the offence.
On the night of the break-in, he went to the house at midnight but the woman had stayed at her mother’s address.
‘Sullivan went to the property expecting to be let in. He did not know her phone had run out of charge. He sent a text message threatening to damage the property unless she came back but she did not get the text,’ said Advocate Baglin.
While inside Sullivan took an iPhone charger and damaged a television but Relief Magistrate Sarah Fitz accepted the damage was not deliberate.
Sullivan also admitted committing a breach of the peace when he turned up outside the property on 4 July.
The prosecutor said that the defendant also breached bail in August when he committed a drunken assault on two family members. Neither sustained any injury and both later retracted their complaints.
Sullivan was sentenced on charges of assault, illegal entry and breach of the peace, as well as breaching a probation order imposed earlier this year after he made threats to knife an inflatable vessel carrying Sea Fisheries officers who wanted to check his lobster pots.
Advocate Alison Brown, defending, said that her client had ‘deeply held remorse’. She urged the court not to send him to prison and to impose ‘a last-chance-saloon probation order’.
‘What is clear from the report is that he wants to sort himself out and that is going to take intervention from outside agencies,’ she said, adding that he had agreed to take part in a number of courses. She also pointed out that he had been in custody since 19 August.
Mrs Fitz said that Sullivan’s offending merited a prison sentence, but the proposed probation rehabilitation package would be more challenging than custody.
‘This is absolutely your last chance. But it does give you a chance, as it keeps you working and it means you can continue to support your family,’ she said.
