A SHOPPER has been jailed for 16 weeks after he fell into a drunken stupor in a wheelchair at Tesco’s Clifton Moor store.

Emlyn Thomas, 40, is “drinking himself to death,” York Magistrates' Court heard.

He was banned from every pub in York and forbidden to be drunk in any public place in the city under a criminal behaviour order in 2018 because of the way he behaves when drinking.

Jody Beaumont, prosecuting, said on August 12, staff at the superstore called in police to deal with him.

Officers found him drunk and asleep in a wheelchair, woke him, and arrested him for being in breach of the order.

It was his 14th time before the courts for breaking the order.

His solicitor Andrew Craven said: “To say to Mr Thomas ‘don’t drink’ is like saying to the rest of us, ‘don’t breathe’.”

Store staff had put Thomas in the wheelchair to await the arrival of the police, he said. He had then fallen asleep.

“You are a thorough nuisance to everyone,” district judge Adrian Lower told Thomas.

“You were a pain in the neck to staff at Clifton Moor, you are a nuisance to the police.

“You have an illness, albeit self-inflicted. You don’t seem to have a thought at the moment to do anything about it, and that is very sad. It would be so refreshing if you could just find it within yourself to say you are drinking yourself to death because that is what you are doing. Is that the way you want to end your days?”

Thomas had been given “every opportunity” to try and change but had not taken them.

Thomas, of Sutton Way, Clifton, pleaded guilty to breaching the criminal behaviour order and was jailed for 16 weeks. He was also ordered to pay a £128 statutory surcharge.

Mr Craven said Thomas hadn’t realised he was in York.

He had thought he was still in Hull where he had been released at the end of his latest prison sentence and taken to hospital for treatment for alcohol withdrawal symptoms. After being discharged from the Hull hospital he had several drinks before arriving in York.

He had then gone to Clifton Moor to buy some more alcohol.

Thomas had suffered brain injury as a result of two falls.