A FORMER honorary police office was yesterday found guilty of assaulting a woman following a three-day Royal Court trial – but was cleared of more serious charges.
Simon Rhys Williams (43) had been accused of throwing the woman to the floor, sitting astride her and choking her with his knees, and later throwing her to the ground in the garden outside a property in St Lawrence where it is said he stood on her feet.
He denied two charges of grave and criminal assault, and was cleared of these charges by the jury yesterday evening.
However, Mr Williams was found guilty of one count of common assault relating to the sitting incident.
Giving evidence yesterday, Mr Williams claimed that he had acted in self-defence.
When questioned by Advocate Adam Harrison, defending, Mr Williams said the woman had been verbally abusive towards him, and had then attacked him physically.
He said: ‘It wasn’t half-hearted. She punched me directly in the nose.
‘I was panicked. I hadn’t experienced anything like it before. I dialled 999 and moved away into the kitchen.’
When asked whether he sat on the woman and choked her, he replied: ‘It didn’t happen.’
The woman claimed she bit Mr Williams’s hand to force him to release her, but he said: ‘I wasn’t bitten in any way, shape or form.’
He said some of the bruises on the woman’s body could have been caused when she was wedged between the kitchen door and the doorframe as she tried to pursue him into the kitchen, and he added that marks on her shoulders could have been caused when he frogmarched her out into the garden.
When asked by the advocate whether he had thrown her to the ground and stood on her feet, Mr Williams replied: ‘Categorically, no.’
Crown Advocate Simon Thomas, prosecuting, disputed Mr Williams’s claim that he had escaped into the kitchen.
He said: ‘You are 6ft 1in. and 22 stone or so. You are a big chap. Why did you need a door between you?’
He replied: ‘It was spur of the moment. The best thing at the time seemed to be to have a door between us.’
The woman alleged that when she told Mr Williams she was going to call the police, he responded: ‘Who’s going to believe you? I am the police.’
However, Mr Williams denied this and told the court that ‘those words did not come out of my mouth’.
However, Advocate Harrison, summarising for the defence, asked the jury: ‘Are the injuries consistent with such a forceful assault as she describes?’
The woman said she had screamed for help at the time of the second alleged assault in the garden. But the advocate cited the evidence given by a next-door neighbour, who said that he had ‘heard nothing that he thought warranted intervention or calling the police’.
