A judge refused to jail a convicted paedophile for another offence and ordered him to pay his latest victim, a six-year-old girl, enough money to buy a new bicycle to cheer herself up.
Relatives reacted angrily as Judge Julian Hall imposed a suspended sentence on Eric Cole, 71, who had previously been imprisoned for abusing a 12-year-old child.
The judge told Cole to pay the girl £250 compensation, saying: “If it buys her a nice new bicycle, that’s the sort of thing that might cheer her up.” He added: “In criminal terms, what you did was quite mild but the effects were serious.”
Judge Hall, 68, said that if he had imposed a jail term, Cole would be unlikely to receive treatment available to him in the community. “If you are not to do this sort of thing again, then you need help,” the Oxford Mail reported him as saying. “The greater chance of children being protected from you in the long term is a Sexual Offenders’ Prevention Order. I want to keep you away from small children.”
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