Taxi ride assault man avoids jailA TIVERTON man has been banned from going out at weekends and ordered to do community work after being found guilty of a drunken sex attack on a hen party reveller.
Jamie O’Loughlin was sharing a late night taxi home with Natalie German when he started groping her and when they got out he pushed her up against a wall and put his hands up her dress.
Testimonials were presented to the judge which described the amateur footballer as a hard working family man and doting father of three children.
His family sobbed with relief in the public gallery of Exeter Crown Court as Judge Erik Salomonsen announced his jail sentence would be suspended.
O’Loughlin, aged 43, of Coleridge Road, Tiverton, denied sexually assaulting the woman in October last year but was found guilty at a trial last month.
He was jailed for six months, suspended for a year, made subject of a weekend curfew for four months, ordered to do 200 hours unpaid community work and pay costs of £600.
The Judge told him:”The victim was a mother of two who had been on a hen night in Exeter and returned to Tiverton but was not the worse for drink. She chose not to go on to a club and took a taxi home.
“By your own admission you have been drinking and were six out of ten on a scale of drunkenness and had been involved in an altercation outside a pub.
“In the taxi you took her wrists and pulled them onto your lap. She began to panic. She was right to do so because when she got out, so did you and instead of walking to your home you put your hand up her dress.
“Clearly your hands were where they should never have been but it did not continue and she went to her home nearby and slumped on the floor in a distressed state."
A friend encouraged Miss German -who waived her right to anonymity at the time of the verdict- to go to the police.
The judge added: “She is no longer confident going out in the dark. The aggravating features speak for themselves. This was an assault on a vulnerable woman in the early hours when there was no-one present on a deserted street."
However, he said he was taking into account the many letters and testimonials which had been written by people who knew him
He said it was clear there was another side to the defendant: "A man who is hard working, devoted to his children and family and who has acknowledged, by cutting back his drinking, that when you are drunk you behave disgracefully.”
Miss Bathsheba Cassel, prosecuting, said Miss German found it hard to trust people, suffers from increasing agoraphobia and is worried about going out at night.
Mr Gareth Evans, defending, said his client continues to deny the allegations but has reduced his alcohol intake and is keen to receive help from probation to prevent any further offending.
During the trial last month the jury head how the woman met O’Loughlin when she was with a hen party who returned to the Half Moon pub in Tiverton at around closing time.
They shared a taxi home with two others who got out first before they got out together near their respective homes.
O’Loughlin denied anything had happened and said he had no sexual interest in the woman.
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http://www.middevongazette.co.uk/Taxi-r ... z3MCEm537l
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