A TORY councillor’s wife who was jailed for posting a racist tweet after the Southport attack has been released from prison.
Lucy Connolly was sentenced to 31 months behind bars in October after being found guilty of inciting racial hatred after she made the post on X following the horrific murders in Southport.
Gary StoneLucy Connolly seen leaving HMP Peterborough this morning[/caption]
PAThe former childminder was jailed in October for 31 months after posting a racist tweet on X[/caption]
Critics have slammed Connolly’s ‘cruelly long and disproportionate’ sentence as an example of ‘two-tier justice’
Today, however, Connolly – the wife of Tory councillor Raymond Connolly – has walked free from HMP Peterborough after serving less than half her sentence.
A prison source said the former childminder was driven from HMP Peterborough in a white taxi this morning after serving 40 per cent of her sentence behind bars before being released on licence.
The car left the prison via the vehicle airlock – a set of two gates exiting the prison – shortly after 10am.
Connolly’s sentencing had been slammed as an example of “two-tier justice” by some, with husband Raymond calling it a “cruelly long and disproportionate sentence”.
After pleading guilty to inciting racial hatred by publishing and distributing “threatening or abusive” written material on X last year, she was jailed at Birmingham Crown Court.
Her tweet – which was deleted three-and-a-half hours after it was posted – said: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the ba***rds for all I care… if that makes me racist so be it.”
She had made the post the same day three children were murdered by Axel Rudakubana in Southport.
Connolly had tried to appeal her sentence in May but the Court of Appeal dismissed the case.
Following this, husband Ray said he was “heartbroken”, adding: “My wife has paid a very high price for making a mistake and today the court has shown her no mercy”.
He also called the decision to throw the bid out “shocking and unfair” and claimed his wife was the victim of “two-tier justice”.
The councillor said: “The 284 days of separation have been very hard, particularly on our 12-year-old girl. Lucy posted one nasty tweet when she was upset and angry about three little girls who were brutally murdered in Southport.
“She realised the tweet was wrong and deleted it within four hours. That did not mean Lucy was a ‘far right thug’ as Prime Minister Keir Starmer claimed.
“My wife Lucy is a good person and not a racist. As a childminder she took care of small children of African and Asian heritage; they loved Lucy as she loved them.
“My wife has paid a very high price for making a mistake and today the court has shown her no mercy.
“Lucy got more time in jail for one tweet than some paedophiles and domestic abusers get.
“I think the system wanted to make an example of Lucy so other people would be scared to say things about immigration. This is not the British way.”
ROD LIDDLE It’s an outrage that Southport tweeter was treated worse than a sex offender – but I know what Two-Tier Keir’s game is
By Rod Liddle
THE law is not an ass – but judges frequently are. And they are at their most stupid when they appear to have been politically co-opted.
Lucy Connolly’s appeal has been rejected by a pompous, public school trio in the appeal courts.
She is the woman with no previous convictions who was sentenced to 31 months for tweeting something horrible about asylum seekers.
That was during those riots last summer. When an awful lot of people received very peremptory justice for saying stuff online.
Everybody could see that Connolly’s sentence was ludicrously severe. Utterly inappropriate for the crime.
Everybody, that is, except Sir Keir Starmer, who tried to claim he didn’t know the details of the case.
And the Appeal Court judges, led by Lord Justice Tim Nice-But-Dim Holroyde. Well, actually not that nice.
Connolly got a longer sentence than has been doled out recently to sex offenders, domestic abusers, robbers, burglars, stabbers . . . and everybody knows why.
It’s because the new Labour government wanted swift justice handed down to these “racists”. So these were political crimes, then.
And as Boris Johnson said, it is as if we were in a police state.
The judges concluded: “There is no arguable basis on which it could be said that the sentence imposed by the judge was manifestly excessive.”
For the rest of us, watching these proceedings in mounting fury, the precise reverse was the case.
There seems no arguable basis on which it could be said that the sentence imposed WASN’T manifestly excessive.
Lucy’s distraught husband, Conservative councillor Ray Connolly, fumed: “The court had the opportunity to reduce her cruelly long and disproportionate sentence, but they refused.”
And Lucy’s barrister said: “They have basically deemed her racist and they’ve decided that that is the ultimate moral sin. Perhaps it is in their world.
“We now have a Labour-supporting establishment and it is their inherent moral evil that the minute you can get painted as a racist, even though you’re obviously not a racist, you become a second-rate citizen.”
This is precisely the case and it is hugely damaging to our society.
It means we lose all faith in our legal system — if we ever had any in the first place — when such outrageous miscarriages of justice occur.
For a long while now, the courts have operated a two-tier system for sentencing. And they do that because, just as the right-wingers say, we live in a two-tier country.
There are the asylum seekers who judges will seemingly not deport, no matter what heinous crimes they may have committed.
And similarly the eco-protestors who cause misery and mayhem, but are praised by idiot judges for their commitment to the cause.
And then, while people who tweeted nasty stuff about those asylum seekers get banged up in Starmer’s state without so much as a by-your-leave, the Government refuses to hold an inquiry into the rape-gangs scandal which implicated so many Asian- Muslim men up and down the country.
What has happened to Lucy Connolly is a scandal.
And it is a scandal which involves the judges AND the Government. In collusion. When that happens, we are no longer living in a free country.
The Free Speech Union – which funded Connolly’s appeal bid – said it did not dispute that the tweet was “offensive” but said it was “deeply disappointed” in the dismissal of the appeal.
It added: “Two-and-a-half years for a single tweet is grossly disproportionate and it should trouble anyone who believes the law must be applied evenly, without fear or favour.”
Connolly’s case has also attracted international attention, with the US Department of State saying in May it was “monitoring” her situation.
After she lost her appeal to reduce her sentence, a spokesman for the state department said: “We can confirm that we are monitoring this matter.
“The United States supports freedom of expression at home and abroad, and remains concerned about infringements on freedom of expression.”
Earlier this year, a teacher was sacked after calling Connolly’s prison sentence “two-tier policing”.
PATory councillor Raymond Connolly – Lucy’s husband – had fought for months for his wife’s ‘cruel’ sentence to be shortened[/caption]
PAReform UK deputy leader Richard Tice had raised concerns for alleged ‘mistreatment’ of Connolly while she was imprisoned at HMP Peterborough[/caption]
Simon Pearson, 56, who taught English to foreign language students at Preston College in Lancashire, lost his job following an internal investigation after he posted about Connolly.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has faced accusations of hypocrisy for defending Connolly’s “harsh” sentencing, after he himself previously suggested those who quickly deleted offensive social media statements should not necessarily face criminal action.
Connolly’s post was viewed 310,000 times in the three-and-a-half hours before she deleted it.
While serving as director of public prosecutions, Starmer introduced guidance for prosecutors to consider a more lenient approach towards suspects who “swiftly” deleted social media posts and expressed “genuine remorse”.
The guidance urged prosecutors to consider four factors where “a prosecution is unlikely to be both necessary and proportionate”.
These included if “swift and effective action has been taken by the suspect and/or others, for example service providers, to remove the communication in question or otherwise block access to it”.
It also urged prosecutors to look at whether the communication was “intended for a wide audience” and if this audience “included the victim or target of the communication in question”.
In June, Reform UK’s deputy leader Richard Tice claimed Connolly was being “mistreated” in prison.
He said she had been handcuffed and stripped of her privileges by prison officers after visiting her at HMP Peterborough.
Mr Tice told The Sun Connolly was a “political prisoner” – and vowed to introduce “Lucy’s Law”, to stop similar cases of overly harsh punishments if Reform came to power.
Saying she was being “manhandled without provocation”, he told The Sun: “Lucy has bruises on her wrists, five days on from being violently manhandled by a group of aggressive guards who forced her into a wing riddled with drugs and violent women.
“Two prisoners have died there in the last 12 months.
“She was supposed to be in the enhanced wing for good behaviour. Something very wrong has occurred.”
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