An appeal launched by English activist and independent journalist Tommy Robinson to have his prison sentence reduced was rejected by the Court of Appeal this week.
The anti-grooming gang campaigner was jailed for 18 months last year after pleading guilty to contempt of court after repeating previous allegations against a Syrian asylum seeker, who won a libel case against Tommy Robinson.
Mr Robinson’s lawyers argued that he suffers from ADHD and “complex post-traumatic stress disorder”, which have been exacerbated by his effective solitary confinement, which was supposedly imposed for his own protection in light of the potential for attacks on Robinson given Britain’s large Muslim prison population.
Forming the basis of the appeal to reduce his sentence, they argued that the original sentencing judge, Mr Justice Johnson, was not made aware of Robinson’s conditions and, therefore, a more lenient sentence would be warranted, The Telegraph reported.
Representing Robinson, Alisdair Williamson KC told the court: “He is being kept safe by the authorities in segregation, but being kept safe is making him ill, and more ill than Mr Justice Johnson could have foreseen on the basis of the information before him.”
The Solicitor General’s office argued that there was “no evidence that the conditions in which the appellant is being held are more severe than was anticipated” and thus there were “no grounds for altering the sentence in this case.”
Court of Appeal judges Baroness Carr, Lord Justice Edis and Lord Justice Warby rejected the appeal, saying that claims about Robinson’s mental state did “not on analysis show either a significant exacerbation of a known medical condition or a material new factor”. They wrote:
“Even taking the appellant’s case at its highest, we see no reasonable basis for the contention that the conditions that he is experiencing are so substantially worse than the judge anticipated at the time of the sanction decision as to call for a downward adjustment.
“The evidence falls far short of the standard for a successful criminal appeal based on fresh medical evidence.”
However, they said that Robinson could reduce his sentence by up to four months if he complied with the court’s demand to remove a film containing the allegations against the Syrian refugee from his social media platforms. Yet, it appears that he has no intention of doing so.
During his activist career, Robinson has been jailed multiple times including at the high-security Belmarsh Prison for filming grooming gang child rapists as they entered court. The men were later found guilty of committing a “campaign of rape and other sexual abuse” against young girls.
After his release from Belmarsh, during which time he was also held in effective solitary confinement, he said that his mental health had deteriorated and he had lost significant amounts of weight after other inmates threatened to poison his food. He compared his treatment in prison to “Guantanamo Bay”.
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