Anger after knife woman goes free (From The Northern Echo)

Anger after knife woman goes free

10:24am Wednesday 8th September 2010 in

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A FORMER childminder who stabbed her partner and left him for dead has walked free from court.

Campaigners condemned the suspended sentence given to Darlington shopworker Monica Dobinson, branding it extraordinary and hypocritical.

Dobinson, 44, knifed Lee Simpson three times after a booze-fuelled argument at their home last September.

Mr Simpson, 36, needed emergency surgery to save his life after the blade of the kitchen knife went right through his colon, as deep as 15cm into his left side.

Teesside Crown Court heard that the relationship, now ended, was “volatile and argumentative” and violence was meted out by both parties.

Deborah Sherwin, prosecuting, told how a shocked Mr Simpson screamed at the former childminder “you stabbed me, you stabbed me”

after she plunged the blade into his chest.

Dobinson, of Salisbury Terrace, Darlington, showed no emotion as she knifed Mr Simpson again in the abdomen.

As he pleaded with her to stop, she struck again, stabbing the blade into his side.

Mr Simpson staggered into the street and managed to flag down a taxi.

In a victim impact statement, he told the court how the incident had “completely changed” his life and he was still struggling to come to terms with what happened.

“I am trying to comprehend why she did this to me,” said Mr Simpson. “Why she stabbed me and left me, basically, to die.”

Dan Cordey, mitigating, told the court: “She gave no thought to the consequences, and it was something that happened in the heat of the moment.”

In May last year, Mr Simpson was given a conditional discharge after he admitted three charges of common assault against Dobinson the previous year.

Dobinson admitted unlawful wounding on the day she was due to go on trial for the more serious charge of wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm.

She was given a 12-month prison sentence, suspended for two years, with 18 months of Probation Service supervision, and was ordered to pay £500 court costs.

The judge, Recorder Tom Bayliss, said he was suspending the sentence because of Dobinson’s previous good character, her guilty plea and the destructive nature of the relationship.

He said there was an element of “accumulative provocation”

and accepted Dobinson’s state meant she did not anticipate the damage she would do to Mr Simpson.

However, John Mays, from the campaign group Parity, described the sentence as “the most extraordinary decision”

and said: “It seems to me far too lenient.”

Mark Brooks, from male domestic abuse charity Mankind, added: “The seriousness of the crime suggests that the sentence is weak and does not send out a strong signal at all.

“The clear test for this judgement is whether the judge would have passed the same sentence if it was a man stabbing a woman in this way.”

The case was heard as it was revealed that nationally four in ten domestic violence victims are men, but their complaints are often ignored by police.

Sergeant Carl Moss, of Darlington Police, said: “This was a serious assault committed with a knife and could quite easily have been fatal. Regardless of the circumstances or provocation, a decision is made by a person to commit an assault rather than making a decision to walk away.”