Gainsborough: Teen who stabbed a random girl at bus stop gets sentence cut

The 16-year-old, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, attacked the girl after becoming angry when he was thrown off a college course.

Taking a knife from his parents’ kitchen, he said he wanted to hurt somebody, like he had been hurt himself, and picked the girl at random.

He approached her as she waited for a bus with her boyfriend last September and stabbed her in the back, between the shoulder blades.

Afterwards, he waited at the scene, without trying to run away, and told police where he had dropped the knife.

In February, after he admitted having a weapon and unlawful wounding, he was sentenced to 18 months’ detention and training at Lincoln Crown Court.

But he appealed and today three senior judges in London said the sentence was too tough and reduced it to 12 months.

Mr Justice Males said a report from the secure facility where the boy is serving his time suggested he had been behaving ‘impeccably’.

His lawyers told the court the boy had already been in custody for over four months when he was sentenced.

But because his sentence is a detention and training order, that would not count towards the serving of his punishment.

Effectively, it meant he had been sentenced to close to the maximum that a boy of his age could get for a wounding offence.

The attack was totally out of character and the boy still had a ‘promising future’, the judges were told.

Giving judgment, Mr Justice Males said that, to give him some credit for pleading guilty and for the time already served, the term would be cut to 12 months.

The court heard the boy’s victim suffered only a minor wound and was out of hospital on the same day.