'Lives will be ruined': Sheffield judge issues warning about dangers of carrying knives for protection

Defendant, Joe Ibbotson, was brought before Sheffield Crown Court to be sentenced on Thursday, March 9 for four counts of possessing a bladed article in a public place and breach of a suspended sentence order.

His barrister, Lily Wildman, told the court that to a ‘degree’ Ibbotson had armed himself with the weapons for his ‘own proctection’.

Passing sentence Judge David Dixon referred to a pre-sentence report prepared on Ibbotson’s behalf, in which Ibbotson, of Hillcrest Road in the Deepcar area of Sheffield, revealed he had previously suffered a ‘serious injury’ during an incident in which he was stabbed.

“Whilst on one level you might have thought it’s right to arm yourself for your protection – what the courts see time and time again is what then happens is often knives are turned on the owner,” Judge Dixon said.

Judge Dixon also suggested that in such instances when knives are used, the outcome can be unpredictable – and even fatal.

“Things go wrong and people die,” he said.

Judge Dixon said that of the four weapons carried by Ibbotson, two were of ‘particular’ concern, namely a Rambo-style knife and a machete.

He suggested that by carrying and arming himself with those sort of knives, Ibbotson had gone beyond what he needed to in order to protect himself.

In mitigation, Ms Wildman said Ibbotson should be given credit for his guilty pleas, and encouraged Judge Dixon to pass a sentence which gave him an opportunity to break the ‘cycle of recent offending’.

Judge Dixon jailed Ibbotson for 18 months, two months of which were for breaching his suspended sentence order, and told him: “It’s a matter for you what you do in due course, but you need to break away from carrying blades.

“To be utterly, brutally honest with you, with young men like you carrying this degree of weapon, someone’s going to get seriously hurt, maybe you, maybe that other person. Whoever it is, two lives will be ruined.”