Instead, Philip Steven Goguelin (44) was sentenced to 12 months’ probation and ordered to complete 160 hours of community service.
He was also made the subject of a five-year restraining order preventing him from contacting the victim and was told to pay £400 in prosecution costs.
In sentencing, the Magistrate, Bridget Shaw, said that she had been considering a custodial sentence but decided to impose the equivalent of a ten-month sentence in community service hours.
She said that one of the reasons for doing so was that the defendant had been in custody since August on remand and had also spent some time in prison when he was first arrested in July.
Goguelin was found guilty at trial in October of pushing the woman’s head against a wall and punching her during an attack at her St Helier home on 9 July.
At a previous hearing, the court was told that Goguelin punched her in the stomach and grabbed her hair before pushing her head against walls in two locations.
The July assault put the defendant in breach of a 12-month probation order imposed in January for committing a grave and criminal assault when he bit the same woman in the face on 7 November last year.
Police legal adviser Advocate Chris Baglin said that on that first occasion the woman was lying in a bed when he got on top of her and bit her. Advocate Baglin said that there was no broken skin, but that there was bruising and a bite mark to the left side of the woman’s
face.
The prosecutor told the court that the defendant spent 46 days in custody before being sentenced to 12 months probation in January.
Advocate James Bell, defending, urged the court to impose a community service sanction rather than a prison sentence. He said that the assault on 9 July resulted in non-permanent injury, as did the January incident.
When delivering the court’s sentence, Mrs Shaw told Goguelin: ‘You were already on probation for a nasty violent act. You bit her face.’ She added that the second assault involved a number of blows. ‘You had pushed her head up against a wall and independent witnesses saw bleeding,’ said the Magistrate.
