A British man will serve only 14 months in prison after being found guilty of committing a string of domestic abuse offenses, including making his partner eat the ashes of her recently stillborn daughter.
Bolton Crown Court heard how Paul McCann, 46, abused Erin Grigsby, 38, during their six-month relationship, which led to charges of intentional strangulation, two counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm, and engaging in controlling behaviour.
Grigsby recounted in a witness impact statement how after meeting McCann online while four months pregnant, he began engaging in abusive behavior, the stress of which she believes was partially to blame for her daughter being stillborn.
Following the death of her daughter, she moved in with McCann, who proceeded to physically abuse her, including beating her the Saturday before her daughter’s funeral. McCann poured superglue all over Grigsby’s hair, forcing her to cut it all off, and put a noose around her neck until she passed out. He also exercised finically abusive behavior, cutting up the woman’s bank card so that she had complete dependency on him.
However, what was described as the “most horrific act of abuse” was when McCann forced Grigsby to eat the ashes of her stillborn daughter.
“There are no words for his sadistic actions and smile as he did the unthinkable,” Grigsby said during her statement to the court. “In this moment I wanted to die… The night terrors are unbearable, and I’ve forever lost part of Nellie to his evil actions. I can’t look at her photos, her tiny hand prints or her ashes without remembering what he did and how he desecrated her ashes.”
After initially meeting McCann, Grigsby had placed a request to the police under Clare’s Law for information on him, which allows authorities to disclose if a partner has been previously abusive. The police did not release the information for four months, at which point abuse against Grigsby had already taken place.
Though he pleaded guilty, McCann was sentenced to only 14 months in prison, and will serve the rest of his three year sentence in the community under conditions.
The United Kingdom’s ongoing issue of lenient sentencing continues to be a point of mockery and disbelief to international audiences on social media.
In May, the British Transport Police came under widespread backlash after proudly boasting on Twitter that a man they’d caught raping a 13-year-old child had been sentenced to just 18 months in prison.
“18 months for a kid he’s traumatized for the rest of her life? Pathetic,” one user wrote, with thousands more overwhelmingly negative replies piling beneath the announcement to express similar disbelief at the lenient sentence.
The British Transport Police hid a number of negative replies, including on which declared that “dead pedophiles don’t reoffend.”
Last week, an Indian student was sentenced to only four years in a young offender’s institution after raping an intoxicated woman in Cardiff city centre last year.
As previously reported by The Publica, a British judge recently prevented the deportation of an Iraqi pedophile who claimed that he was bisexual. The man had served just 10 months in jail beforehand for the sexual abuse of a child.
