Attacker loses court bid to get sentence cut
A YOUTH worker jailed for savage assaults on his girlfriend almost 16 years ago has failed to convince top judges he was harshly punished.
Andrew Tesim Samuels, 42, a community worker at Cotham School, was arrested after an ex-partner contacted police and told them he had attacked her a number of times whilst they were in a relationship in the 1990s, on one occasion breaking her arm.
Samuels, of Redcliffe Backs, Bristol, was jailed for 44 months at Bristol Crown Court on February 10 this year, having pleaded guilty to two counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm and one of unlawful wounding.
He asked Lord Justice Aikens, Mr Justice Holroyde and Judge Peter Rook QC, sitting at London's Criminal Appeal Court, to reduce that sentence, claiming he was treated too harshly.
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The court heard Samuels assaulted the woman, who cannot be named, when she was a teenager: stamping on her, then hurling her through a glass coffee table, punching her in the face and breaking her arm with a rolling pin.
Lawyers argued Samuels has "changed and become a better person" since he committed his crimes.
He had spent the last decade and a half contributing greatly to his local community mainly through youth work, the court was told.
That change of character ought to have led to a reduction in sentence, it was submitted.
But Mr Justice Holroyde said Samuels was "responsible for a reign of terror against the complainant" regardless of what he did with his life thereafter.
"It is clear that this sentence was not too long in all the circumstances. He used his shod foot as a weapon against a complainant who was a younger woman. We have concluded that the total sentence cannot be criticised either as wrong in principle or manifestly excessive."
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