A TEENAGER who got a 14-year-old girl pregnant has been locked up after top judges ruled his suspended sentence was far too soft.
Jake David Rudd, 19, of Bromley Street, in Clifton, York, was given eight months suspended detention at York Crown Court on January 27.
But the Solicitor-General Robert Buckland QC referred his sentence to London’s Appeal Court, insisting he should be behind bars. Three senior judges responded by handing Rudd a two-and-a-half-year detention term.
Rudd admitted four counts of sexual activity with a child as well as possessing indecent images of a child. He had 55 indecent images of the girl on his phone, Lord Justice Davis told the court.
“It was purely your selfish sexual drive which got her into the position she found herself in having to have the termination,” the Crown Court judge had told Rudd.
But, after allowing Rudd to walk free, the judge told him he was a ‘very fortunate young man’. Jake Hallam, for the Solicitor-General, pointed to the pregnancy and termination, the age gap, the images taken and Rudd knowing what he did was ‘wrong’. In her victim impact statement, the girl said: “It kills me every single day to think about what I did to my baby.” Rudd had no previous convictions and his barrister, Nicholas Rooke, pleaded for him to stay free.
He pointed to Rudd’s relative youth and immaturity, as well as his guilty pleas. The Crown Court judge had ‘seen the potential’ in Rudd to rehabilitate himself, Mr Rooke told the court.
But Lord Justice Davis said Rudd’s crimes involved ‘grooming and planning’.
“This sentence was unduly lenient,” concluded the judge, sitting with Mr Justice Holroyde and Judge Christopher Kinch QC. “The gravity of this overall offending ... was and is simply too serious to justify a sentence which is anything other than an immediate custodial sentence.” He ordered that Rudd report to Fulford Road Police Station by midday yesterday to start a two-and-half-year term of detention in a young offenders institution.
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