Judge Patricia Lynch QC (pictured) caused a stir last year following an extraordinary exchange with a racist thug in which she swore at him
A controversial judge who once called a defendant a ‘c***’ has defied legal guidelines by showing leniency to an illegal immigrant who cheated her way into the country using someone else’s passport.
Judge Patricia Lynch QC caused a stir last year following an extraordinary exchange with a racist thug in which she swore at him.
She was later cleared of judicial misconduct.
Now Judge Lynch has courted controversy again after she handed a suspended sentence to a Somali woman who used someone else’s passport to enter the UK – an offence that ordinarily ends up with the offender being jailed.
Barwaaqo Ahmed, 43, posed as someone else when she flew into Stanstead Airport from Munich in April last year.
Her husband, meter reader Saeed Osman Hersi, 43, also faced prison for helping her into the country.
But after hearing the pair had three daughters, one of which is breastfed, Judge Lynch instead handed them suspended sentences, describing them as ‘otherwise perfectly decent and law-abiding people who have proved themselves to be hard workers and good citizens’.
She said : ‘The long and the short of it is that the law is perfectly clear and I should pass a minimum custodial sentence.
‘I have to take into account, as I am entitled to, the article which looks after [the right] to family life.
At Chelmsford Crown Court (pictured) Judge Lynch refused to jail a Somali woman who entered the UK using someone else’s passport
‘I have to consider whether sending these two to prison immediately for some four and a half months is in the interests of the public at large. Clearly the authorities are of the view that it is because it is so serious to enter this country with false documents.’
Judge Lynch then challenged the prosecution to appeal her decision.
She said: ‘If the Crown are of the view that my sentence is wrong then I encourage them to appeal me and let the Court of Appeal decide once and for all whether “exceptional circumstances” are essential for suspended sentences when we are dealing with otherwise perfectly decent and law-abiding people who have proved themselves to be hard workers and good citizens.’
The couple, from East Dulwich, south-east London, were both given nine-month prison sentences suspended for a year at Chelmsford Crown Court.
Ahmed pleaded guilty to possessing an identity document with improper intention and her husband pleaded guilty to assisting her unlawful immigration into the UK.
He had bought her ticket online and travelled with her from Germany.
A jail term for the pair would have meant leaving their three daughters – aged eight, five and 18 months – without any parents at home.
The court heard Ahmed, who does not speak English, breast feeds the baby, who was born in the UK and is a British citizen.
She was desperate to come to Britain to be reunited with her husband who she had not seen since 2013 and soon after arriving she became pregnant and the baby was born in January.
Hersi arrived in the UK in 1990 and gained citizenship in 2000.
The couple married in 2008. Their two Somalian born daughters have been here since May this year and have obtained British citizenship.
Their mother fled from Somalia in 2015 and made her way to Germany but was refused permission to enter the UK in 2016 but has an appeal pending.
Judge Lynch said judges throughout the land were confronted with cases like these time and time again and had to follow sentencing guidelines.
But as she refused to jail them she added that there was no absolute embargo on a judge suspending a sentence or any statutory requirement that there should be ‘exceptional circumstances.’
Judge Lynch hit the headlines after she labelled a racist thug a ‘bit of a c***’.
The extraordinary outburst came as she was sentencing 50-year-old John Hennigan, who had breached an ASBO by using racist language towards a Caribbean woman and her two young children.
Hennigan called her a ‘bit of a c***’.
During the hearing at Chelmsford Crown Court last August, Judge Lynch replied: ‘You are a bit of a c*** yourself’.
When Hennigan, from Harlow, Essex, screamed back: ‘Go f*** yourself’ the judge replied: ‘You too.’
In January, Judge Lynch was cleared of judicial misconduct after her case was referred to the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office (JCIO).