A MAN who was jailed for failing to carry out a community service order has had his appeal against the sentence dismissed.
Mohammed Babrul Hussain appeared in the Magistrate’s Court in January charged with failing to complete the 100-hour order, which had been imposed for a motoring offence.
He was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment for the breach.
While appealing against the sentence to the Royal Court, Hussain argued that the punishment was excessive and that the Magistrate, Bridget Shaw, had refused to allow him to complete the order after telling him – during sentencing – that ‘people cannot expect to have second chances’.
In a recently published judgment, the Royal Court said: ‘In our view when the Magistrate said, “people cannot expect to have second chances”, she was meaning that offenders are not entitled to a second chance, are not entitled to decide when it suits them to comply with their obligations under a community service order and she was quite entitled, in our view, to make that observation.’
The court also dismissed Hussain’s claim that Mrs Shaw was wrong to say she had no confidence that he would comply with the order. The judgment continued: ‘We have revisited the Magistrate’s remarks and she did not expressly say that the reasons for her absence of confidence in the appellant were the previous convictions for failing to comply with the community service orders.
‘But even if she had said so and that was a matter in her mind, the appellant’s previous offending history is a matter that she was entitled to take into account when deciding the appropriate sentence to impose in this case.’
The Royal Court dismissed the appeal and concluded that the sentence was not ‘wrong in principle or manifestly excessive’.
