Locations
Willow Bank, Brayton, Selby, North Yorkshire, YO8
Description
APPEAL court judges have doubled a North Yorkshire sex offender's prison time and ordered him to hand himself in to police.
Benjamin Dilnot was jailed for two years and five months for sexually assaulting a woman in November last year. York Crown Court heard that because he had spent just under 500 days on remand, he would be released shortly.
The woman told the court she had had nightmares for years, would bear the scars of his actions for the rest of her life and has been seeing a counsellor.
The Attorney General sent his case to the Court of Appeal on the grounds that the sentence was too short for the sexual assault which, York Crown Court heard, had been a prolonged and violent incident.
Three judges sitting in the Court of Appeal agreed and increased the sentence to four years and nine months. As Dilnot was a free man at the time of the hearing, they ordered him to hand himself in to a police station so that he could be sent back to jail.
It is the second time Dilnot has been jailed for offences against women. Before he was sentenced in November, he had served a two-year prison term for offences against a second woman.
After carrying out the offences against the first woman, he was acquitted of alleged offences against two more women at two trials.
He is currently subject to three restraining orders which ban him from contacting the first woman and the two women he was acquitted of committing offences against, and going near any of their homes among other conditions. He will be on the sex offenders’ register for 10 years.
Dilnot, now 23, of Willow Bank, Brayton, pleaded guilty to offences including sexually assaulting the first woman, causing her actual bodily harm and witness intimidation against her, all committed when he was 18.
Andrew Petterson, prosecuting, said after the sexual assault, Dilnot had tried to get the first woman to withdraw her statement against him by phoning her repeatedly despite being under bail conditions not to contact her. He claimed he would kill himself, that she had ruined his life and that he would never get a job.
Defence barrister Laura Addy said there had been a period when the first woman had been protected under an earlier restraining order when he had not contacted her.