Pitiful Excuses Are Tendered Because They Work…

Prosecuting, Dempster said Starmer told officers her motive in making up the story was financial.

She said: “A friend of hers asked her to concoct the story to see how much money they could make.

“She had not been threatened by this person, but she wanted this person to be her friend.

She did not realise it was a criminal offence to sign a false witness statement.”

Dempster added that the money from selling the story would have gone to the friend and Starmer felt “ashamed and embarrassed” of her actions.

Those specific actions being ‘getting caught’…?

Mitigating, Justine Robinson said: “She had no option but to take the action she did for money that was never going to go to her.”

Nope. She had every option not to. She could have cost someone their job.

The judge said: “She had several opportunities to bail out and abandon the enterprise, she had no need to put a false story on Facebook or ... to sell her false story or to make a false statement to police.

“If she was put under pressure, she could have abandoned the scheme several times, but she did not do so and only admitted her wrongdoing when confronted with the CCTV evidence.”

So she’s (rightly) hearing a cell door clang shut behind her now?

Sentencing her to eight months in prison, suspended for two years, the judge Simon Hammond told Leicester crown court she had avoided jail “by a whisker” .

*sighs*