Gambling great-grandma sentenced over £115k theft

2 tier justice! at least it's a deterrent from stealing £115k, knowing you'll be let off when it's eventually discovered.

Pamela Bent

this is pretty recent - so no affordability checks?

Affordability indeed.

Some of the things she 'likes' on her facebook.

Cider there are loads of mitigating circumstances.

She handed herself in
She'd already paid back nearly half when she handed herself in
Her age and health
Her desperate circumstances
She had no chance of ever getting away with it
And she has to sell her house to pay it back
No previous convictions (probably)
Little chance of her re-offending

There's zero sense in sending her to prison, especially since there is no room

It is cases like this that have led to tighter regs for the rest of us.

Did that amount in 18 months so on average did in over 6k a month.
Husband out of work but as has been pointed out she was allowed to spend freely.
If it's found that a bookie has soaked up a large wedge from her ill-gotten gains they should be forced to reimburse the organisation and fined heavily.

The mitigating circumstances can arguably reduce the sentence, not give an effective free pass.


And reading the article, so much of it appears to me at least to be presented incredibly sympathetically. If stealing money to pay the mortgage, why not, erm, pay the mortgage with it rather than spunking on gambling? Just how much of a mortgage liability is a 60+ yo likely to have? This job will have a decent salary and pension, with state pension on the horizon and quite possibly other occupational pensions. Probably drawing PIP as well, judging by the picture.


Sorry this one does not pass the sniff test, the full story is not in the public domain.

agree with Clydebank...sending folk to prison costs a fortune....England sends the most folk per head to prison than anyone else in europe with Scotland close behind...Its an utter waste of money giving lots of folk free board and lodgings especially this old woman, who has paid most back, sold her house etc.

and its laughable to think this auld wifie is a danger to the public at large.

Half of europe is in our prisons!

What other punishment and deterrent are you advocating for ? Unless you think she should no be punished at all ? btw returning what you stole is not a punishment.

she has lost her home...thats a pretty big punishment in my book.

not sure what banging her up for a few years achieves other than costing the taxpayer yet more dosh.

I personally wouldn't argue for a few years. 3-6 months.

I'm not having that. She 'sold' her home due to gambling debt. That's not punishment, it's a consequence. Actions have consequences.

In any case, I don't believe this was about the mortgage. To be informed, we'd need to know the capital liability, the valuation and what was the gain being realised before satisfying the debt. My sense is that this is likely to be a property of substantial value. Just my instinct, and I have good instincts.

aberdonia 15 Oct 24 20:14 
agree with Clydebank...sending folk to prison costs a fortune....England sends the most folk per head to prison than anyone else in europe with Scotland close behind...Its an utter waste of money giving lots of folk free board and lodgings especially this old woman, who has paid most back, sold her house etc.

nonsense..ewe have to have precedents to deter crime..

if you think folk are deterred by a prison sentence......lol, or even think about it..
financial penalties are much more penal than free board and lodgings.

been involved in crime most of my life..its a deterrent believe me.

Thats maybe why the english like jailing folk...more than anyone else in europe.....all those precedents..haha

imagine life with no prisons... Ffs

Have to agree that if I'd nicked 100 grand (from anywhere) and got found out, I'd be expecting to be put inside, whoever I was...

The net theft was about half that stu.  Sure you would expect jail in most cases, but not every case.  And this case is at the extreme soft end of such cases.  It is no deterrent to anyone locking this woman up,  She is not a danger to the public and it costs the public money.  Had she pleaded not guilty I'd have given her a custodial.  Prisons should be mainly for serious crimes, for career repeat criminals, and for lesser crimes with a not guilty plea.  You pay the money to lock them up and get the benefit that they are not a threat to the public locked up.

OK so embezzle over £100K from a charity, as long as you're female and approaching retirement age, the worst that can happen is needing to pay it back if sprung?

Maybe it will encourage people who are as stupid as this woman was, not to gamble, to pay some of the money back and hand themselves in too.

Judge showing common sense.

Being female got nowt to do with it in this case imo, and not a defence I used.

She'd be able to gamble in prison.

Too many folk in prison as a punishment when community
service would be far more appropriate.

Rehabilitation is often overlooked.

Should be priority.

tbh, id be locking up the auditors at the charity she embezzled from..lol

Sex of the offender should have nowt to do with it. Certainly not lack of prison places. But it does.

Wimmins jails full of farrage rioters

folk are jailed for the most trivial things....I was reading that in england some folk have been in prison for decadeds for minor offences, due to the type of sentence given.

i just dont see the logic in locking up all these folk, unpaid work so that they contribute via community service much more preferable to me.

thats more of a punishment than a nice warm cell and 3 meals a day for most of the folk jailed for nonsense.

A prisoner who was initially handed a 15-month sentence after being found guilty of attempting to steal a coat and mobile phone has been released 18 years later.

Danny Weatherson, 35, from Newcastle was just 17 years old when he was jailed and was told he should only serve 15 months in prison.

However, he was handed an Imprisonment for Public Protection sentence (IPP), which meant it was down to the discretion of the parole board to decide whether he was a risk to the public and therefore had no confirmed release date.

He has finally been released 18 years later





Crazy stuff...

yes, thats it, its like a gulag punishment...banana monarchy stuff....

Doubt it's the full story, but I doubt anyone is arguing for that either. Just proportionate punishment, and extracting over £100K from a charitable org, via falsifying documents when holding a trusted position warrants bird. Dealing in paedophile material warrants bird. Stealing a packet of crisps and a sandwich or posting hurty words on social media does not.

He'd have been due nine free upgrades on that phone by now

He is not alone, there are hundreds of these folk in england who have been in prison forever, for the most trivial of offences...

im sure they have changed the law so it cant happen going forward, but this does not help the poor bggers who have been in jail forever...

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/devastation-prisoner-newcastle-danny-weatherson-29213727

weatherstones still in click..he's a fruitcake.

aberdonia 15 Oct 24 22:33 
He is not alone, there are hundreds of these folk in england who have been in prison forever, for the most trivial of offences...

ewe dont get IPP'd for trivial offences.

Watching Parole on bbc after a tip as I would not usually watch bbc. Chap from that part of the world on an 'IPP'. He assaulted a man with someone else by stabbing them 42 times (victim somehow escaped with his life). He was let out and a few months later, with other people kidnapped a bloke he was told was a sex offender, assaulted him, put a knife to his throat and threatened to kill him. Victim somehow escaped as well, fleeing his own house by breaking through a window (he was not a sex offender).

The parole board have let him out FIVE times, going back inside after re-offending

The other narrative is a woman who when she was 16 put a kitchen knife through a man's heart and killed him. That was 2011. Minimum sentence was 15 years, so is already approaching the time when she could be let out.


It's 4/4, but a good tip off to watch. V interesting.

I couldn't countenance letting either of them out. Murdering someone in cold blood, practically zero motive, out at 31, nah. No sane person would do one of those offences the chap did, never mind twice. And even now he's still trying to justify doing them, I see little contrition.

I couldn't countenance letting either of them out. Murdering someone in cold blood, practically zero motive, out at 31, nah.

100% agree - some awful crimes get far too little punishment. In particular when they target another person's life directly.

So her story is that she got drunk, had a text row with someone. Her and her mate both tooled up with kitchen knives and went to the house where the lad was. They were rowing with him so owner of the house comes out to see what's going on, she plants the kitchen knife through his chest (ie, not even the lad they were rowing with).

Mitigation is that she was abused by step father, and learned to be aggressive as defensive technique.

31 months for a tweet.

yup

Does seem incredibly excessive, though her tweet was very inflammatory (encouraged mass murder).  It's also about stopping a growing problem escalating in it's tracks.  So much for women getting soft sentences heh!     

The bigger issue I have is this.  That someone made a complaint about the tweet and X responded that they saw nothing wrong with it, and wouldn't take it down.  So one rule for an individual and zero consequence for repeated offences from a foreign large corporation.  Something seriously wrong there.

response was from an automated bot.  Which if it was courtesy of X, you would assume it was powered by AI.  So much for Musk's expertise then.

Yes tweeted out of understandable anger, the whole tweet attacked many people and it was not literal, obviously. If there is a case for suspended sentences, this is one of them. I believe she herself lost a child.

People who cause actual harm get to walk away, some people who just write (stupidly) about harm get sent to prison. The tw@ts who felt it was fine to smash in the faces of armed female cops are not even facing any charges.

The establishment seeing her as evil personified wipes out any credit she has from being a little way up the grievance hierarchy (female), in fact right at the bottom, below pond life, gammons and paedos.

My argument against perps who use "abused as a youngster" & mental health issues as mitigation is that there are many sufferers from those who do NOT go around killing, maiming, robbing. So it's got to be something else about the perps. I watched the Parole prog last night. I must say the Board members did not instill confidence as far as I was concerned. Care in the Community should be about Caring for the safety of the community rather than keeping an eye on someone to see if he or she reoffends.

The chap made the obvious point that she had all the education, then got into a fight over something trivial with another lag AFTER the education. Effectively saying that demonstrated she might not be fully ready for the outside. Perfectly sane. Then he let her out anyway!

So what repercussions will he face should she re-offend, given the fact that he overrode the evidence? (dw rhetorical!)

It didn't even look like prison where she was already, more like a holiday camp with a farm lol

What I gleaned is that smart(er) people can get around the parole interview, and dim people will flunk it. The chap was in complete denial about his drugs addiction. All they wanted to hear from him was that he had drug problems in the past, he completely regrets it and he was going to go clean from now on. Seemed to me he was a thug and would easily slip into trying to kill someone for a third time as soon as he got out, he blames everyone else for his problems, apart from the obvious.

Good to hear. Twatter is so ubiquitous it's pretty impossible to avoid its influence. Half of journalism now centres around people regurgitating twatter for their output, without leaving their house.

At least it doesn't have the major political bias it once had.