Judge intimidated by the Almighty Bruiser Reid?

Could it possibly have been that the judge in Mold, North Wales was accurately following existing guidelines and actually felt that Derek Williams did not need to be jailed and instead should be put under supervision on a suspended sentence? Perish the thought.

Could it be that the judge took the opportunity to do a bit of grandstanding to re-immerse multiply-immersed John Reid in the proverbial doo-doo? Shurely shome mishtake?

Perhaps it might be educational to look at someone else who stood before Mold Crown Court yesterday:

A man who was obsessed with his estranged wife has been jailed for eight years for her attempted murder. Christopher Deakin, 37, travelled from Scotland to Llandudno, Conwy, after telling his wife Jane he was going to kill her, Mold Crown Court heard. She was stabbed 22 times with kitchen knives, two days after the couple's seventh wedding anniversary when they met and he left her a love poem.

Or we could look back to January 20th:

A Mid Wales gunman who terrorised two police community support officers after he took the law into his own hands has been jailed for two years. Russell Price Ellis thought the police in Newtown were not doing enough to catch the people responsible for thefts from his late mother’s house and he warned officers he was going to go after those he thought were responsible. But when he crept up to one intended victim’s house and found the two PCSOs on watch outside, he turned his gun on them, Mold Crown Court heard yesterday.

So it does appear that those wacky judges at Mold Crown Court are still sending people, which they regard as dangerous enough, to jail.

Of course, it is possible that the judge made a mistake in the Williams case. He could have been so over-awed by the almighty Scots dynamism of our "bruiser" Home Secretary that he was shuddering in his shoes when he decided on Williams' sentence and felt he could do nothing except follow what he thought were Reid's orders, against his better judgement. But this is unlikely, to say the least.

The point of all this is that, unless you actually sit through a trial, as the judge and jury do, it is very difficult, not to say silly, to second-guess the judgements of the court. The judge sat through all the details and made a judgement based on guidelines that have repeatedly been emphasised by the sentencing guidelines panel. We have to leave it at that, unless we want all sentencing done by the editor of The Sun, whose brain, of course, is fully intact.