By Staff Reporter

Last updated at 10:47, Monday, 07 May 2012

A man from Penrith has been jailed for four months for beating up his wife.

He was sentenced just days after being sent to prison for defying a court order banning him from going to her house.

A judge at Carlisle Crown Court told 51-year-old William Wong that in normal circumstances the two four-month sentences would have run consecutively, so that he would have received the equivalent of an eight-month sentence.

But a quirk in the law – with the assault being a criminal offence and the breach of the court order being dealt with by a civil court – meant that the two sentences would have to run at the same time.

The court heard that Wong, who has previously lived in Carleton Hall Walk and Roper Street in Penrith, had been banned from his wife Anita’s house by their landlords, Impact Housing, to protect their neighbours from “disturbance”.

As a result, nobody else would take him on as a tenant, so he was homeless and had been camping at Pooley Bridge, where his wife sometimes joined him.

But in April he twice broke the court injunction by visiting her at her home in Penrith.

It was for that that last Monday he was given his first four-month sentence.

In recent months he had also violently assaulted his wife, leaving her with bruises to her face, as he had done on other occasions in the past, the court heard.

A report by a probation officer stated that “both have drink problems and arguments take place when they have been drinking.”

Wong – described at a previous court appearance as a “violent drunkard” who used his wife as a “punchbag” – pleaded guilty to a charge of common assault by beating her.

He will have to serve half of the four-month prison sentence imposed for that offence before being released on licence.

Passing sentence, Judge Barbara Forrester told him: “If you continue with this behaviour you will go to prison for longer and longer periods.”

First published at 09:12, Monday, 07 May 2012
Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk