‘I’ll disfigure you’ lover escaped longer jail term
AMAN who subjected his expartner to a “terrifying and protracted series of crimes” received a “far shorter” sentence than he “richly deserved” due to errors over his case, judges have ruled.
During an attack in May, Gareth Jex strangled his former partner, punched her in the face, dragged her by the hair, threw a butter knife at her, bit her, and said “I’m going to disfigure you so that nobody will want you”.
The decision to charge him with a single count of assault by beating, a summary-only offence with a maximum sentence of six months, was labelled “quite wrong” by senior judges in a Court of Appeal judgment yesterday. Lord Justice Edis, sitting with Mr Justice Turner and Judge Usha Karu, said the woman was a victim of a miscarriage of justice.
“The charging decisions in this case are incomprehensible,” he said.
The judge said Jex’s offending was “in fact at least one offence of assault occasioning actual bodily harm” and was “seriously aggravated by manual strangulation in the context of sexual jealousy or possessiveness”.
He added that there were also “features of false imprisonment”.
The judge noted that Jex had 39 convictions for 65 offences or breaches of court orders from 2001 to 2020.
He said that also charging Jex with criminal damage for throwing a small vase to the floor added “an air of absurdity to the way in which this case was conducted”.
“If properly charged, this offence would have justified a substantial sentence, having regard in particular to the terrible record of the applicant, which includes repeated breaches of a restraining order imposed to protect this victim,” he said.
The judgment included a statement from Jex’s victim, who detailed the “physical and mental damage” he had caused her for a decade, describing it as “fighting a losing battle”.
She said: “Due to Gareth’s mental abuse, extreme jealousy and controlling ways I am now a shell of the person I previously was.
“Gareth continues to treat me as his property and this is soul-destroying for myself as I have had no life since I met him,” she added.
Lord Justice Edis said the court had received a “letter of apology” from a district Crown prosecutor, who said the charging decision “failed to give adequate consideration as to the mechanism of the assault, the use of the multiple weapons and the sustained nature of the attack”.
The letter said a review of the case and the failings was under way within CPS Wales to “identify what action can be taken to prevent a repetition of the error”.
Lord Justice Edis said: “The person to whom an apology is really owed is the victim... who has not been protected by the system as she should have been.”
Jex, then aged 35 and from Llwydcoed, near Aberdare, was sentenced to 56 weeks’ imprisonment in July for the charges of assault by beating of his ex-partner and criminal damage, as well as an unrelated count of assault by beating and two offences of fraud by false representation.
The sentence also covered the activation of a suspended sentence from June last year for three offences of theft and one offence of racially aggravated harassment.
The suspended sentence had been one of 27 weeks’ imprisonment suspended for 18 months, but was entered in the Police National Computer (PNC) as 18 weeks’ imprisonment, suspended for 18 months, Lord Justice Edis said.
“The judge believed that he was imposing the full term of that suspended sentence, but because of the error in recording that order on the PNC he did not actually do so,” he said.
Lord Justice Edis said “the error on the PNC means that he escaped nine weeks of a prison sentence which he richly deserved to serve”.
He concluded: “In the result Jex has received a sentence which is far shorter than it should have been had he been prosecuted properly and sentenced on the basis of reliable records.”
Details of the case and the judge’s views came in a judgment over Jex’s appeal of a sentence given at Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court, which was dismissed.