THE SENTENCING JUDGMENT in the case of McCanns v Bennett

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2013/332.html

This is the official record of the sentence passed on my by Mr Justice Tugendhat on 21 February 2013.

I also have a paper copy of the official transcript of the proceedings of that day and will try to get that posted up on here in due course:

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England and Wales High Court (Queen's Bench Division) Decisions

You are here: BAILII >> Databases >> England and Wales High Court (Queen's Bench Division) Decisions >> McCann & Anor v Bennett (Sentencing Remarks) [2013] EWHC 332 (QB) (21 February 2013) URL: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2013/332.html Cite as: [2013] EWHC 332 (QB)

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		Neutral Citation Number: [2013] EWHC 332 (QB)
		Case No: ATC/11/0841

IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
QUEEN'S BENCH
DIVISION

		Royal Courts of Justice Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
		21/02/2013

B e f o r e :

THE HONOURABLE MR JUSTICE
TUGENDHAT
____________________
Between:

	(1) GERRY MCCANN (2) KATE MCCANN	Claimant
	- and -
	TONY BENNETT	Defendant

____________________

Ms Adrienne Page QC and Mr Jacob Dean (instructed by Carter-Ruck)
for the Claimants
The Defendant appeared in person
Hearing dates: 21
Febraury 2013
____________________

HTML VERSION OF SENTENCING
REMARKS
____________________

Crown Copyright ©

See Judgment: [2013] EWHC
283 (QB) Judgment



Mr Justice Tugendhat :

1. Mr Bennett, for reasons set out in the judgment which I handed down this morning (Neutral Citation Number [2013] EWHC 283 (QB)) I have found you to be in breach of the undertakings you gave to the court in the order dated 25 November 2009. My findings relate to thirteen breaches. I have made no finding in relation to the very large number of other breaches which the Claimants have alleged. The Claimants did not ask me to, for reasons explained in my judgment.

2. The Claimants have made clear that they consider that the question whether to impose a penalty, and if so what penalty, is a matter for the court alone to decide. Their objective in bringing this committal application has not been to see you punished, but to put a stop to the repeated conduct which you undertook to the court that you would not repeat.

3. Ms Page has made submissions to the court. But apart from making clear the stance which the Claimants adopt, these submissions are directed to reminding the court of the statutory powers and relevant case law, with a view to assisting the court to dispose of the matter in accordance with the law.

4. By the Contempt of Court 1981 s.14 the Court has power to impose a custodial sentence limited to a maximum of two years. A custodial sentence may be immediate or it may be suspended. The court also has power to impose a fine.

5. Matters which are relevant to the punishment in this case include the following. The Claimants have suffered injury to their
reputations and feelings by the repetition of the allegations which you have repeated in breach of your undertakings. I have found that you have acted intentionally in the manner explained in my judgment. You were deliberately flouting the Undertakings, and the apology that you offered when giving your evidence was insincere. I am sure that you appreciated the seriousness of what
you were doing, not least because you trained to be a solicitor.

6. It is also important to record, as I did in my judgment, that the Claimants and their solicitors have repeatedly warned you of
the seriousness of your actions and of the consequences. They resorted to this court only when you made clear by your conduct that there was nothing else that the Claimants could do to persuade you to comply with your undertakings. The consequence of the Claimants showing this restraint has been that they have incurred very large legal costs. These costs do not reflect any omplications or difficulties in the case other than the difficulties that you have intentionally put in their way.

7. In mitigation I take into account the letters which I have read from your brother and from others. You have done much in your life to help others. At this hearing you have apologised again. And on this occasion I accept that your apology is sincere.

8. The overriding consideration is that the purpose of committal proceedings is to ensure that a contemnor complies in future with the undertakings which he has flouted. Your conduct in this case has been so serious that I am satisfied that nothing less than a custodial sentence would reflect the seriousness of your breaches and the harm that you have done. The sentence will be one of three months custody.

9. However, I am also satisfied that I can suspend the sentence for one year, on condition that you comply with your undertakings in the future for so long as they remain in force during that period of suspension. The effect of that will be that if you breach the undertakings during that period, you may be brought back before the court and committed to prison to serve this sentence of imprisonment and any other sentence that may be imposed upon you for the further breach.

10. I order that you pay the costs of the proceedings to be the subject of a detail assessment if not agreed.

11. The directions for the hearing of your application to vary or discharge your undertakings will be set out in an order to be drawn
up.

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5. Matters which are relevant to the punishment in this case include the following. The Claimants have suffered injury to their
reputations and feelings by the repetition of the allegations.....

Oh I can see from their VIP invite to Everton a month before the trial.....Everyone is Happy happy happy! Must rewrite the Oxford dictionary that Happy actually means suffering injury to reputations and feelings. Well they say you learn something everyday, I never knew this

That was the bit that jumped out at me too!

Thank you Tony, for the info and also for what you have done not just for Madeleine, but for Lee Balkwell and others.
Please now do one more thing, more important than all the rest, let others carry the batten in your absence, until you are clear.
The hawks are hovering overhead, they are ravenous, fierce and waiting for your slightest, tiniest slip up.
With the press charter up in the air, with Goncalo's case coming up soon and he has so much more information that he has not declared, things are moving very fast and your actual input can be spared for the while.
Please contact us by p.m. if you want, but keep your slate clean.
That is so important, not just for you but for all of us and Madeleine too.

bobbin wrote:Thank you Tony, for the info and also for what you have done not just for Madeleine, but for Lee Balkwell and others.
Please now do one more thing, more important than all the rest, let others carry the batten in your absence, until you are clear.
The hawks are hovering overhead, they are ravenous, fierce and waiting for your slightest, tiniest slip up.
With the press charter up in the air, with Goncalo's case coming up soon and he has so much more information that he has not declared, things are moving very fast and your actual input can be spared for the while.
Please contact us by p.m. if you want, but keep your slate clean.
That is so important, not just for you but for all of us and Madeleine too.

Bobbin, I agree with every word you have written. So Tony take very special care

I agree with both bobbin and Nina.

Thank you for all you have done and take care of yourself.

I'll just add to my previous post that nobody could possibly have harmed the McCanns' reputation more than they have themselves with their behaviour over the last nearly 6 years.

Please Tony, as has already been said, let other people now pass on messages from you.

tony thank you for all your hard work, you are one hell of a man.
but please take a back seat now for a while, dont put yourself in more jeapordy

wjk wrote:I agree with both bobbin and Nina.

Thank you for all you have done and take care of yourself.

f
From me too Tony thank you

PeterMac wrote:In 1939 the British Expeditionary Force was sent to France to sort out a little local difficulty
They were pushed back to Dunkirk by superior forces and a way of waging war which they had not seen before.
They re-grouped, planned new strategies,

and on 6th June 1944 . . .

...and I add Sun Tzu; He who knows when to fight and when not to fight will be victorious.

Tony, I too hope that it will be possible to lay low the coming year and that there will be an reasonable solution for the financial burden they have laid on you. Thank you for all you have done.

I have always been a "what if" person. Since clearly in this trial it was only about the undertakings and not about finding the truth of what really happened to Madeleine, I can't help but wonder "what if that truth comes out one of these days"? Don't forget that SY once has to stop wasting taxpayers money. The Amaral trial will be soon too. What if that shows that most of what you have been saying was closer to the truth than all the nonsense statements of team McCann, will you automatically be reimbursed, freed of your undertakings, and get your good name back?

That will be the day .....

and it will come!

Awesome post ij,
I second it wholeheartedly!
Now hand me that spliff mate,
I am proper Dutch as well.
Have to.

parapono

Good to hear from you Tony,but ,as all your supporteres are saying,please do take care.What is so so sad is that "someone somewhere" is just watching and waiting for you to "slip up",and then all your hard wonderful work for Madeleine would have been futile. We still have to hope Mr Amaral will "take them to the cleaners",or,you never know ,our very own SY are actually sorting all the facts from fiction,in the crime of the century!!!.

Tony as bad as things are right now your day will come, and as already said please take a back seat you have done more then enough for justice for Maddy, but in the not to distant future the McCanns are going to be found out for what they are now whether this comes from SY, PJ or Amaral I don't know but it will happen.....I've never seen the McCanns look as bad as they do at the moment, now is that the look of two people who are home and dry?

I think not! .......... sit tight Tony rest up and watch these two face the justice they truly deserve.

I took a dive - nose pinched closed - again in the cesspit. And ... I must say, I wouldn't describe them as vitriolic anymore, rather as just pathetic. More like visiting an asylum ;-)
Well, as long as the 8 [9?] of them are still happy, let nature take its course ...

Buildersbum wrote:Tony as bad as things are right now your day will come, and as already said please take a back seat you have done more then enough for justice for Maddy, but in the not to distant future the McCanns are going to be found out for what they are now whether this comes from SY, PJ or Amaral I don't know but it will happen.....I've never seen the McCanns look as bad as they do at the moment, now is that the look of two people who are home and dry?

I think not! .......... sit tight Tony rest up and watch these two face the justice they truly deserve.

seconded
nothing to add

parapono

Have the costs been finalised yet?

brilynn wrote:Good to hear from you Tony,but ,as all your supporteres are saying,please do take care.What is so so sad is that "someone somewhere" is just watching and waiting for you to "slip up",and then all your hard wonderful work for Madeleine would have been futile. We still have to hope Mr Amaral will "take them to the cleaners",or,you never know ,our very own SY are actually sorting all the facts from fiction,in the crime of the century!!!.

Tony, you might even be able to take a little pleasure in knowing that some poor s*ds (Kevin, Bevin, Tracy and Levin) are having to sit through hours and hours of trawling through these threads, all of them, paid by the hour as mere underlings, in the hope that they'll one day pick you off at some unguarded moment.
Let them be doomed to the disappointment of being unable to take any prizes back to their overlords.
The only consolation for them will be that they are being paid for an apprenticeship in eye opening, gob smacking, discovery, that the people they are protecting are not worth the salt and that there are people out there who won't let the matter settle until that most precious of rewards is mined, "justice for a little girl".
Happy hunting Kev, Bev, Trace and Lev, you're actually benefiting more from being on this site than you could ever have imagined. You might even grow up to become good upright citizens with a conscience one day and then become good responsible parents, know the real happiness of parenthood and make a worthwhile contribution to society.

saltnpepper wrote:Have the costs been finalised yet?

Not yet. I will let you all know soon.

admin wrote:

saltnpepper wrote:Have the costs been finalised yet?

Not yet. I will let you all know soon.

thanks admin,

parapono

admin wrote:

saltnpepper wrote:Have the costs been finalised yet?

Not yet. I will let you all know soon.

Thanks

muratfan
‏@muratfan


4m




@zampos http://watchingthetrolls.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/tony-bennett-committing-perjury-and.html …

BENNETT COMMITTED PERJURY AND LIED UNDER OATH @carterruck #mccann

hope this helps find maddie

Keep your head held high Tony, Good luck.

Not great at deductive reasoning is he? (MF) Especially since TB always posts under his own name.

The only comment on the blog is that it could be from someone answering on behalf of Tony. That might be an alien concept to MF.

The only proven liar in court was Mike Gunhill, on his own admission. Several times. It's in the transcript.

All good wishes to TB plus a thanks to admin for keeping us updated.

PeterMac wrote:It will not help find Madeleine.
For the simple reason that no one is interested in finding her, and no one is looking for her.
The parents gave up that pretence a long time ago, when they sacked the last in a long line of ineffective private investigators.
Grange is not trying to find her, it is reviewing the way the preliminary investigation was carried out, to see if anything significant was missed.
The people who make attacks like this are not reviewing what is already known, and trying to fit it all together to make a credible scenario from which one could draw certain conclusions - with one significant exception. They seem to be in thrall to TM, believing that everything that was said was true and verifiable, even when the things that were said are contradictory, and believing that the actions were decent and correct under the circumstances.
And strangely that every witness whose testimony does not support this view must be wrong or a liar.
So the motivation of the attackers is completely obscure.
They cannot, surely, be acting on the instructions of TM or on their behalf.
Even I do not believe C-R would stoop so low as to employ this tactic.
So we are left with a number of choices.
One is that the mention of paedo*** by GM and the rest in the very early stages, even though they have tried to resile from this more recently by insisting Madeleine has come to no harm - employing a very loose definition of harm, hitherto unknown in normal English usage - has seriously rattled him, or them, and they feel the need to attack as the best form of defence.
The second is that references to child neglect, negligence, constructive abandonment, and even cruelty have the same effect.
A third is one of psychiatric health. We know that there are sites in which a very few people pour out hatred and bile to each other, mercifully almost unknown to the rest of the world.
There may be more, but I would hesitate before committing them to the keyboard.

That hits the nail squarely on the head PeterMac.

Good post.

tigger wrote:The only comment on the blog is that it could be from someone answering on behalf of Tony. That might be an alien concept to MF.

He's desperate isn't he?

Of course Tony knows that I will post up info for him if necessary.

Although, of course, I would have to stop at suggesting the McCann's had anything to do with Maddie's death, or that they hid her body and faked her abduction which is the conclusion of the official Portuguese police investigation (which can be found here http://www.mccannfiles.com/index.html and here http://themaddiecasefiles.com/ and here http://www.mccannpjfiles.co.uk/ and here http://www.gerrymccannsblogs.co.uk/) just in case any journalists are looking in and they haven't read the files.

Oh, and anyone can also read Amaral's book based on the official police investigation here: http://frommybigdesk.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/maddie-truth-of-lie.html
and here http://goncaloamaraltruthofthelie.blogspot.co.uk/

Is that ok with you muratfan?