Mr Justice Morris has reduced the sentence of 48-year-old man, David Jeffers, who mistakenly shot a woman in vagina when a sex game went wrong, from 10 years to eight and a half.
It was gathered that before the incident occurred, Jeffers messaged the woman before they met, referring to ‘dat ting you want up ya’. They also discussed her fantasy of having a loaded gun placed in her vagina. Upon meeting, Jeffers had a drink and drug-fuelled sex session with a woman at the Britannia Hotel in Offerton, Stockport.
However after the antique shotgun went off while it was inside her. Jeffers he ran away, caught a train to Leeds and shaved off his dreadlocks to change his appearance.
Justice Morris ruled that he had been hard done by, and didn’t have the gun to commit a crime and that the woman was up for the ‘dangerous act’. The incident caused ‘catastrophic’ and ‘life-changing’ internal injuries, which had had a ‘devastating’ impact on the woman.
Cutting the sentence, the judge continued: ‘On any view, his conduct here was extremely reckless and, by his plea, he accepted that it was his intention to endanger life.
Nevertheless, in our view, there are a number of factors which lead us to the conclusion that this sentence was excessive. A sentence of the sort which the judge gave is, in our judgment, the sort of sentence that may be more likely to be imposed for possession of a gun in the context of serious criminal activity. .
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In this case, the context was a consensual sexual encounter. There was no background of criminality. Secondly, this isn’t a case of the possession of a conventional modern gun.It was something like a functioning antique pistol with the least lethal in the range of shotgun pellets. He wasn’t in possession of the gun for the purpose of committing a criminal offence. .
There was no hostility between the parties. She was party to the dangerous act. ‘Taking account of all of the factors, we consider that the appropriate sentence after guilty plea in this case would have been one of eight-and-a-half years.’
