STARKIE: LET-OFF FOR LOOTER

The girlfriend of a riot suspect served with an eviction notice was spared jail today (Thurs) for looting electrical goods during last month’s riots.

Jo-Neil Starkie, 18, was caught outside Currys in Clapham Junction after grabbing some mobile phone speakers.

Starkie, who was arrested with Daniel Sartain-Clarke, also 18, at the scene, covered her face with her hands in shock today as a judge gave her a suspended jail sentence.

Sartain-Clarke’s mother Spanish-born Maite de la Calva, 43, has been told by Wandsworth Council she will be turfed out of their £225,000 taxpayer-subsidised home as the tenant if he is convicted.

Starkie, who has 10 GCSEs and was working as a trainee croupier in Westfield Shopping Centre, told officers at the scene she ‘wasn’t thinking right’.

She added: ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it.’

Lesley Jones, prosecuting, said Starkie went to the scene after receiving a call from a distressed friend who could not get out of the area because of the mayhem.

The barrister said: ‘Between about 10 and 11 later that night Starkie and her boyfriend arrived at St John’s Road and they saw that people were running round and smashing things outside and in the vicinity of Currys.

‘The shutters were pulled up and windows were smashed.

‘There were people going into the shop.

‘She saw a box of electronic speakers on the shelf and she picked them up.

‘There were a great many people in the store taking items and she says that she decided to take the items.

‘She carried them from upstairs and left the shop.

‘The police approached her and she threw the items back through the shutters and ran away.

‘She managed to dodge officers but she was tripped up and detained by a TSG (Territorial Support Group) officer.’

Guy Bowden, defending, said Starkie had gone to help a friend who was working in Clapham and could not get on a bus home.

By that time it was 90 minutes after the raid on Currys had been launched.

‘She didn’t set out intending to participate,’ he added.

‘She was very much a straggler.’

Starkie, whose ambition is to study law or accounting at university, was in tears throughout the hearing as Mr Bowden said: ‘She knows her conviction won’t help her in obtaining a job’

Judge Roger Chapple retired for 10 minutes to consider her fate, returning to give her eight months in jail suspended for 12 months.

He also imposed 12 months’ supervision and 100 hours’ unpaid work on the youngster who has been described as ‘likeable, quiet, shy and respectful’ by a worker at her local Christian centre.

The sentence is a rare example of a non-custodial sentence resulting from the riots, with most defendants including those admitting less serious offences, being handed several months behind bars.

The judge said the teenager, who was wearing two plastic crucifixes, has a caution for shoplifting which was down to her being ‘easily led’.

He told Starkie: ‘You know perfectly well the attitude of the courts to offences such as this.

‘Everyone in the country does now.

‘Severe and deterrent sentences are generally passed to ensure that nothing like this every happens again and to reassure the public, on whose behalf I pass sentence, that law and order has been restored.

‘You are now in serious trouble because you followed the dreadful example set by others because you weren’t able to say ‘no’.

‘You have not had an easy time of things as you were growing up and it seems to me that you dealt with those difficulties with courage.’

He added that in a letter to him: ‘You go through what you have lost by what you did.

‘You have lost your home, your job and your liberty.

‘There must be a sentence of imprisonment, but I am going to suspend it.’

Starkie, of no fixed address, admitted burglary.

Sartain-Clarke, who was in the public gallery with his mother and several friends and members of the family, is due to return to the same court on October 7 for a plea and case management hearing.

Sartain-Clarke, of (fl 10) Kennard House, Francis Chichester Way, Battersea, faces charges of violent disorder and burglary and has yet to enter pleas.
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