Manchester: Man who fractured skull of homophobic drunk pest avoids jail
A man who attacked another man for harassing a group of gay women in Manchester has been spared jail.
The defendant, Andrew Duncan, had been celebrating a friend’s birthday outside the Rembrandt pub on Sackville Street in June last year when he saw the drunken individual making lewd comments at two women.
When the women told him they were gay and asked to be left alone, the man laughed and taunted them for several minutes.
Duncan, who had no previous convictions, then barged the 29-year-old in the chest with his head, causing him to fall and bang his head.
Manchester Evening News reports the man was treated at the city’s Royal Infirmary for a fractured skull and a bleed on the brain after Duncan barged him, and has no memory of the incident which occurred last June.
Duncan was given a nine-month sentence, suspended for 18 months, with supervision and a requirement to attend an anger management course.
Judge Martin Steiger QC said: Ordinarily anyone causing that type of injury on the streets of Manchester by violence would expect to receive a significant custodial sentence – this however was an exceptional case.
“The defendant acted after a very prolonged period of provocation, the victim, a man of bad character, was plainly drunk and abusive.”
