Jail Sentences Halved for Animal Rights Activists

By Laura Scott, PA News

Two animal rights activists jailed for making thousands of harassing phone calls to research laboratories, including Huntingdon Life Sciences, today had their sentences halved.

Paul Leboutillier, 44, from Harrogate, North Yorkshire, was originally sentenced to five years, and Paul Holliday, 38, from Sheffield, South Yorkshire, to 18 months after they both admitted one charge of causing a public nuisance.

But the Court of Appeal today ruled that the sentences, passed at York Crown Court on February 26 this year, were “excessive”, and substituted terms of 30 months and 9 months respectively.

The court heard that the pair’s original case may have been tainted because their phone calls coincided with a campaign by other animal rights activists who were sending letter bombs and death threats to the same animal research laboratories.

The letter bomb campaign ran between December 2000 and February 2001.

But the court heard that Leboutillier and Holliday never had anything to do with this campaign, as was recognised by the sentencing judge.
Appeal judge Mr Justice Henriques said: “Letter bombs were sent to a number of people in the animal industries at the same time as the appellants making harassing phone calls.

“Some of those targeted in that campaign received malicious telephone calls or annoying calls at work or at home ... people connected with Covance and Huntingdon Life Sciences.

“Neither appellant had anything to do with the sending of such letter bombs.”

Between them the pair made more than one thousand calls to the Covance laboratory in Harrogate and Huntingdon Life Sciences – the “vast majority” of which were solely intended to jam switchboards.

They also called the home numbers of Covance staff and shareholders at Huntingdon.

Leboutillier, who initially denied his charge, waged a five-month campaign between December 2000 and April 2001 and some of his calls were said to be “threatening and intimidating”.

Holliday was involved in a year-long campaign between August 2000 and August 2001 – although his calls were purely said to be harassing and “of a nuisance nature but not of a threatening type.”

Giving judgement halving the sentences, Mr Justice Henriques, sitting with Lord Justice Clarke and Mr Justice Beatson, referred to Holliday’s mitigation that he was a “vulnerable individual” who had “fallen under the influence of more militant members of the animal rights movement ... and rued his involvement.”

Of Leboutillier’s actions he said: “The phone calls were not repeated to any particular victim, no actual violence was inflicted on anyone, no property was damaged. The defendant never followed up threats by taking action.”

He said that, particularly in Leboutillier’s case, “the judge found himself being influenced by what he thought was a connection between the appellant and the person responsible for a campaign of letter bombs when in fact there was no such connection.”

Neither Leboutillier nor Holliday, who was expected to be released from prison immediately having served half of his new sentence, was present at the hearing.

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