Prosecutor Helen Tench said the assault had a “detrimental impact” on the traffic warden. No physical injuries were reported.<\/p>\n
In a police interview, Doughty said he had become frustrated because the machine would not accept coins, adding that police were “more interested in ripping off a pensioner”.<\/p>\n
In mitigation, defence solicitor Robert Hanratty said Doughty, who appeared in court in a wheelchair, accepted responsibility for his behaviour.<\/p>\n
“He will be the first to admit that when he gets agitated, he does swear,” he said.<\/p>\n
Hanratty added that the Probation Service recognised he suffers from anxiety.<\/p>\n
“He very much regrets this incident. She was doing her job, and she puts up with a lot of stick. <\/p>\n
“Unfortunately, he chose to vent his frustration on Ms Williams.”<\/p>\n
Probation officer Julian Davies said Doughty became “very frustrated” when money repeatedly fell out of the machine and felt the warden was being dismissive.<\/p>\n
“He deeply regrets his actions and didn’t mean to assault the warden,” he said.<\/p>\n
The court heard Doughty, a retired HGV driver, has two previous convictions for battery and threatening behaviour.<\/p>\n
Magistrates fined him \u00a3500 and ordered him to pay \u00a3200 compensation to Ms Williams. <\/p>\n
He was also ordered to pay a \u00a3200 victim surcharge and \u00a385 in court costs, bringing the total to \u00a3985.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Prosecutor Helen Tench said the assault had a “detrimental impact” on the traffic warden. No physical injuries were…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":544274,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-544273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544273\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/544274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}