SUPREME COURT Three years gaol for robbery

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33965, 4 October 1975, Page 17

SUPREME COURT Three years gaol for robbery

"Counsel described this as an ill-conceived plan, but you selected your victim well—a 62-year-old woman alone in a shop —and you battered her to the floor so that your accomplice could rob the till. Mr Justice Roper said in the Supreme Court yesterday when sentencing Frederick Llewellyn Williams, aged 25, unemployed, to three years imprisonment.

Williams pleaded guilty on arraignment to a charge of aggravated robbery of a woman at the Somerfield Phar-j macy on April 21, and causing her grievous hodily harm. The sum of Sib was stolen from the till.

Evidence had been given In the Magistrate’s Court that Williams and a young woman entered the chemist’s shop about 4.30 p.m.‘ The shop woman, who was alone at the time, was grabbed by the shoulder and throat, thrown to the floor, dragged behind a counter, and repeatedly hit about the face and head by Williams. The woman suffered extensive bruising about the

face, head, and throat, and had cuts which required stitching. Mr R. T. K. Burtt, for the prisoner, said that it was an ill-conceived plan in which Williams was supposed to divert the attention of the assistant while his woman accomplice took money from the till. Things went wrong when the assistant became suspicious. Williams panicked, and went further than [he intended.

The suggestion to rob the shop was made by Williams’s woman friend. He did not need the money, but she did, and he offered to accompany her.

Williams had a long list of convictions. He came from a violent and disturbed family background. His was a crime alien to decent citizens, but Williams had been brought up in a home envi-

ronment m which his father [figure “regularly meted out violence.”

At present, Williams was serving a sentence of nine months imprisonment on a charge of receiving. He had saved the Crown time and money by pleading guilty, Mr Burtt said.

His Honour said that he accepted counsel’s submission that Williams had an appalling family background, of which violence was a feature. He had had few opportunities in life, but although that afforded some explanation for the offence there was not the slightest justification for it.

The Court had to deter such conduct, said his Honour, sentencing Williams to three years imprisonment, the term to be served at the expiry of his present sentence.