Introduction and Facts
It’s an arresting image (that lead to Mr McCabe being arrested) – a man jumps onto the bonnet of another person’s car and starts punching the windscreen.
The driver of the car starts to nudge forward (and builds up a little bit of speed) but Mr McCabe clings on.
This bit of activity (along with two other assaults during a later visit to a hospital) got Mr McCabe sentenced to 9 weeks imprisonment on 1st September 2016.
The reasons for this are vague – it seems that it was accompanied by a volley or racial abuse, but that’s about it. Mr McCabe was drunk – it seems that he had had a litre and a half of vodka, washed down with some beer.
This happened on 3rd August, and it seems that there was a guilty plea to that.
Ten days later, on 13th August, Mr McCabe was in the mental health unit at Glenfield Hospital where he assaulted a patient and a member of staff. He was convicted of both those offences after a trial.
Sentence
Mr McCabe was sentenced to a total of 9 weeks in prison. What we don’t know is the breakdown, and how much of that is down to the criminal damage to the car.
There are guidelines for criminal damage (see page 44), although they don’t help too much in a case such as this.
It would seem that the more serious offences were the assault (presumably Common Assault) of the two people in the Hospital, and these may well have attracted the lions share of the sentence.
At a guess, and it is a guess (there’s not much detail at all), he got 4 weeks for each assault, with an extra week for the criminal damage.
It’s a nice headline, and the video is a nice visual for the news, but it could have used a bit more detail …