Judge tells youth he 'deserves a good kicking'

A judge told a youth that he “deserved a good kicking” for punching a policewoman’s car after a late-night row with his pregnant girlfriend. Dexter Vidal, 20, caused £400 damage when he attacked the car of Pc Ginny Jupp, who lived next door to his girlfriend.

Sentencing him, Judge Anthony Scott-Gall told Vidal that it was unsurprising that the officer’s two grown-up sons had confronted him in the street after he attacked their family car.

“I’m not surprised he was given a good kicking, it’s what he deserved,” he said. “If someone punched my car then I would make sure, if I had two sons, that he was given more of a good kicking.” But, he added: “Possibly not, having regard to the job one holds down.”



After dealing with the case, the judge turned to the press box at Lewes Crown Court in East Sussex and said: “Lest the press think the judge conducts a vigilante campaign against people that terrorise his neighbourhood and his car, he doesn’t and they haven’t – and I have one son, not two.”

Judge Scott-Gall had already spared Vidal prison in February 2008 for having two knives in a gang fight, when he suspended a 12-month prison sentence for two years.

After hearing that Vidal had now stopped drinking and got a job, he gave him one final chance, deferring sentencing on his latest convictions until March. This would allow him to see “whether he continues in employment, abstains from drink, keeps the law of the land, that he complies fully with the Asbo and causes no trouble to Mrs Jupp and her family”.