As for mitigation for sentencing purposes the problem isn't that it is offered but that such rubbish as "he did well in school", "a few people like him" and "he wants to turn his life around" are given any weight at all.
Were they given any weight though? All the paper has noted was that those things were said, it didn't report whether the judge made any mention of them in sentencing.
As for the help and support from employer, that is all well and good but who pays for it? Certainly not the person responsible and that is the crux of the justice system at present, even when every hoop is gone through and a case is proved everyone bar the perpetrator pays.
Is there a workplace injury insurance scheme (injury can include mental health issues caused in the workplace) in Britain? They would be the ones paying for the necessary therapy and support for a return to work plan (which would be funded out of premiums, of course) while you would hope the train operator would have an insurance fund set up to limit their liabilities in circumstances like this instead of leaving them out of pocket.
For the broader issue of "who pays" for the whole lot, if it were a person of greater wealth instead of Tisdale then the train company and/or the workplace insurer) would have the option of making a civil claim for compensation over the costs incurred in paying for their employee's rehabilitation, extra payroll costs of paying overtime to others who would cover her role, and so on.
But unless you want to roll back the clock 200+ years and reintroduce slavery, sometimes you just have to accept you can't get all the money back.
And yet the defence solicitor, Ceri Edwards, said He was formerly a successful young man who had achieved much in school and was a highly thought of young member of the local Labour Party.":roll:
Clearly people like Ceri Edwards cannot be trusted to give an accurate representation of a persons character. It sounds to me like she will literally say anything to try to get the judge to be sympathetic.
I wonder how people like her can bring themselves to do a job where, basically, a part of the job is to get scumbags out of the punishments they deserve by giving false representations?
A quick search will reveal that Ceri Edwards is a junior solicitor who works for a local firm which is a Legal Aid provider, so she was probably the only one able to represent Tisdale. It definitely doesn't sound like she's some high-flying celebrity lawyer making hundreds of thousands of pounds from spending weeks researching possible loopholes for the case, she was probably quite embarrassed to be going through the motions of representing Tisdale in such an obvious case.
It does appear that she did the major part of her role correctly - convincing Tisdale to plead guilty and save everyone the wastage of having a trial. The principle of making sure justice is done
and that justice is seen to be done demands that she say at least
something when asked if there is anything to offer in mitigation, even if it's just trotting out a couple of sentences of predictable tripe which is actually just code for "no, there's nothing really."
Any lawyer wanting to work in criminal law has to go through this entry-level stage of a career before getting to move up the ranks and do any meaningful work. They don't get paid well doing this stuff, and they definitely don't enjoy it.
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Or is there another way of attracting the driver's attention to prevent them from leaving?
It could even have been as simple as the driver hearing the incident happening and taking a look out his window at the platform - very possible if this is a quiet station without any other trains noisily running through. If the driver sees their colleague on the platform when the doors close and a buzzer code comes through you'd hope they'd pause for just long enough to realise something's not right.
