...but this man was locked up for three weeks for not buying a £2.70 rail ticket
A MAN was jailed for three weeks for not buying a £2.70 train ticket, a court heard.
Magistrates locked up Bradley Howsego after he admitted he had ‘ bunked’ the fare for a 15-minute journey. But he was released yesterday after a senior judge criticised the sentence as ‘entirely inappropriate’.
Howsego, who is unemployed, admitted to a train conductor that he had ‘bunked’ the fare for the trip from Hythe to Colchester in Essex.
He was jailed after rail operator Greater Anglia told magistrates that he had six previous convictions for fare evasion – a claim which turned out to be untrue. In fact, he had been fined only once, and had no criminal convictions for fare dodging on his record.
Howsego, 22, was jailed by Chelmsford magis- trates on July 18 and has remained behind bars after being refused bail pending his appeal.
Judge Jonathan Seely, sitting with two magistrates at Chelmsford Crown Court, yesterday granted his appeal against the custodial sentence with ‘no hesitation’. He cut the 21-day sentence to one day, ensuring his immediate release.
As he did so, the judge questioned whether fare evasion should be considered a criminal matter.
He said: ‘It must have been a very short journey. I observe in passing that in many European countries fare evasion is not a criminalised matter at all. We are unanimously of the view... the custodial sentence is entirely inappropriate.’
The court heard that to be jailed for such an offence there had to be aggravating features, and there was none in Howsego’s case. He was prosecuted by a representative from Greater Anglia for evading the £2.70 fare on June 22. He pleaded guilty.
Yesterday his solicitor Sarah Steggles said Howsego had just one previous conviction for a similar offence, a £7.20 fare, for which he had been fined £374.
But she told the judge that at the magistrates’ hearing, the railway prosecutor wrongly claimed that Howesgo had six criminal convictions for fare evasion.
Miss Steggles called for fare evasion to be decriminalised. She said: ‘I just don’t believe that we should be sending people away for railway fares. It’s not an offence that is criminally culpable in that way – the railway authorities should take it into their own house and ban them.’