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Artist News Legal
Joss Stone plotters see sentences cut
By Chris Cooke | Published on Wednesday 21 May 2014
The two men convicted of plotting to kill Joss Stone have had their prison sentences reduced on appeal.
As previously reported, in a bizarre plot Kevin Liverpool and Junior Bradshaw travelled to Devon from Manchester with the intention of stealing £1 million they believed pop star Stone kept in a safe, before kidnapping the singer, beheading her and dumping her body in a river. The plan was thwarted when locals spotted the two men acting suspiciously as they attempted to find her home and reported them to the police.
On original sentencing, Liverpool, seen as the instigator of the plot, was handed a life sentence, with a minimum jail term of ten years eight months before any parole could be considered. Bradshaw was sentenced to eighteen years in prison with parole an option at six years seven months.
Liverpool appealed against his life sentence, with his legal team arguing that the burglary and murder plans were so shambolic that they weren’t serious enough for a life term. The appeal judges did not agree, however, but did cut the compulsory jail time down to six and a half years. Though the appeal court was keen to stress this didn’t mean they were saying he should be released at that time.
Meanwhile Bradshaw’s sentence was properly cut, down to ten years, with the judges stating, according to Sky News, that the defendant was “of exceptionally low intellectual capacity and [had he been more intelligent] he would have realised that the chances of a successful and profitable robbery were so remote as not to be worth attempting”.
The judges agreed with the lower court ruling that Bradshaw was very much the “foot soldier” in the escapade, and therefore if Liverpool’s sentence was being reduced, so should be Bradshaw’s.
