Spared jail, lying PC who had innocent sergeant lover locked up for ‘abusing her’
A JEALOUS police officer who saw her colleague and ex-boyfriend jailed when she made false allegations of domestic abuse against him was yesterday spared prison herself.
PC Amanda Aston, 44, used her specialist training in domestic abuse to construct a web of lies about former police sergeant Matthew Taylor, a court heard.
Mr Taylor, 35, was charged with domestic abuse, jailed for two months and lost his job at Surrey Police after she reported him when their eight-month relationship ended in 2017.
He was released from prison only when his mother Elizabeth Bond trawled through thousands of messages between the pair to prove Aston was lying.
The case was dropped against Mr Taylor and Aston was convicted of perverting the course of justice and fraud after she took £5,000 from Surrey Police Welfare Fund claiming she needed the money to move away from her ex.
But her 21-month sentence was suspended for two years because immediate custody would have meant her daughter would have to be cared for by her 81-year-old mother.
Domestic abuse charities last night blasted the ‘double standards’ that saw the single mother avoid prison when her actions caused her victim to be jailed.
Chairman of the ManKind charity for male victims of abuse, Mark Brooks, said: ‘This is as clear a case of the double standards that male victims of these crimes face that you will ever see.
‘If the genders were reversed, I am sure he would be in prison and rightly so.’
Aston, who had worked at Guildford Police station alongside Mr Taylor, wrote a 57-page witness statement making false allegations about her former partner’s ‘control, abuse, harassment, intimidation, degradation and gaslighting’, Maidstone Crown Court heard.
She claimed Mr Taylor would grab her by the throat during sex, put her in fear of violence, caused her to lose her hair and stop eating.
Mr Taylor was imprisoned in March 2018 for two months after Aston bombarded him with messages encouraging him to get back with her – before reporting him for breaching bail conditions forbidding contact.
In letters written to his family from Winchester Prison, where he spent 23 hours a day in a cell, Mr Taylor said his ordeal left him rejected by Surrey Police and struggling with his mental health.
‘I have lived a life of turmoil recently, not knowing what to do... seriously struggling mentally and I have been anxious and terrified,’ he wrote.
‘I felt like I let my friends and family down. This severely
‘Double standards male victims face’
low mental state led to physical distress.’
Jurors took nine hours to convict Aston of all charges in March, but her defence lawyer, Kevin Baumber, argued that immediate custody would be unfair on her young daughter.
Handing down a suspended 21-month sentence and 100 hours unpaid work, Mr Justice Cavanagh told Aston, from Seaford, East Sussex, that her child was the ‘exceptional’ factor that had kept her out of prison.
‘Though childcare responsibilities are not an automatic passport to a non- custodial or suspended sentence, it is only with the greatest reluctance that the court sends to prison the single mother of a young child.’