I’ll wear a tag if I’m set free, says black cab rapist
BLACK cab rapist John Worboys will have to wear a tracking device and take lie detector tests if he is released from prison, it was revealed yesterday.
Lawyers for the serial sex attacker said he had agreed to wear a global positioning system ankle tag as part of the conditions of his release – and had agreed to avoid using pornography or drinking heavily because they could increase the risk of him reoffending.
The court also heard he will be banned from Greater London and Sussex – described as a ‘massive exclusion zone’.
Two of the former taxi driver’s victims have asked the High Court to overturn a Parole Board decision that the 60-year-old should be freed and have warned he could still pose a risk to women. But his legal team told judges he had served the minimum term of his jail sentence and was ‘entitled to freedom’. Worboys, 60, was jailed indefinitely in 2009, with a minimum term of eight years, after he was found guilty of 19 offences against 12 women, including rape, sexual assault and drugging victims.
Police believe he targeted more than 100 women over a six-year period, although the Crown Prosecution Service decided against bringing further charges. Lawyers for two of his victims said the Parole Board should have considered those wider allegations.
They argued that the threemember panel appeared to have accepted that Worboys was now ‘ open and honest’ without question, despite discrepancies between his account of his crimes and the police investigation.
There was an outcry in January when it emerged that the serial sex attacker was now considered a ‘ low risk’ and could be freed within weeks.
But his barrister Edward Fitzgerald QC said it would have been unfair for the Parole Board to make its decision based on allegations that had not been tried at court.
He told the High Court Wor
‘Expressed his sense of guilt’
boys had admitted he was a multiple sex attacker and that he had abused his position as a taxi driver to take advantage of vulnerable women. He had completed a sex offender treatment programme in jail and ‘expressed his sense of guilt at what he had done and his relief at being caught’.
Mr Fitzgerald said it was ‘drastic and unprecedented’ for a prisoner to be approved for release but then to be kept in prison.
Lord Justice Leveson, part of a three-judge panel hearing the judicial review at the High Court, said the victims’ case was that Worboys had made a ‘carefully crafted admission’ of guilt to … play down any danger he still posed.’
His release was halted after the victims won the right to the judicial review, and he will be kept in prison until the judges make a ruling, which is expected within weeks.