Prison chiefs accused of blocking mother jailed for social media post from seeing daughter


A jailed mother is being prevented from seeing her daughter, allegedly due to prison officials' concerns about social media and public attention.
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It is believed Connolly has qualified for an enhanced regime, a reward for good behaviour. Probation documents suggest her application for release on temporary licence at her previous prison, HMP Peterborough, was delayed until a risk assessment was done.

One internal note said: “It is not necessarily going to happen due to the public interest.” Another said: “The media interest has been raised as an issue in terms of any future ROTL applications.”

Connolly is also not automatically eligible for home detention curfew, where prisoners can be released as little as a fifth of the way through their sentences by being placed on electronic GPS tags with restrictions on the times they can leave their home.

Offenders convicted of racially aggravated offences are excluded from home detention curfew unless they can show there are exceptional circumstances to override the ban.

However, two fellow inmates who applied for home detention curfew at the same time as Connolly have been granted the right to go home on tags, despite both having been jailed for causing death by dangerous driving.

Connolly is also seeking to appeal against her sentence, with a hearing due on May 15. Adam King, her barrister, is expected to argue that the judge miscategorised her offence, with a sentence wrongly based on intending to incite serious violence.

This meant she received a longer sentence than she should have done. If it had been “correctly” categorised under Sentencing Council guidelines, she could have been jailed for less than two years, which would have made her eligible for a suspended prison sentence.

Mr King will also argue that the judge failed to give sufficient weight to mitigating factors.

These included an unblemished record, positive good character references, messages that she also sent saying violence was not the answer, that she deleted the post in three and a half hours and her emotional sensitivity to children’s deaths after the loss of her 19-month old son in a major hospital blunder 10 years earlier.

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