From the Mailbag

This arrived in the e-mail:-

Defendant appeared in Court for sentencing having pleaded guilty to Driving whilst disqualified.

Was in Court three weeks previously when the Bench adjourned for reports. Their indication was for a 12 week suspended sentence.
13 days after his Court appearence he committed a further driving whilst disqualified.
Aggravating factors included committed whilst on Bail for the first offence, and whilst assisting in preparing report for Probation. Previous driving whilst disqualified 2 years ago.
No mitigation other than guilty plea.

What do people think? I don't know what happened either, but I hope that my correspondent will let us know the outcome.

Later:-
This is what happened (edited for anonymity):-

The responses from the blog reflected what we ultimately decided. The main difficulty on the day was that there were only 2 of us on the Bench and could not at first agree on the sentence. It took a long time to come to agreement but we eventually got there. We kept going back to the structured sentencing principles and highlighting the circumstances. The final sentence (given credit for guilty pleas) was 8 weeks custody for the first offence and 12 weeks for the second to be served consecutively, a total of 20 weeks.

Thanks to my correspondent for the info.