Sarah Regan as leading junior, successfully prosecuted Mark Lester, a prolific paedophile charged with 58 sexual offences. In a trial which lasted for five weeks, the jury heard harrowing evidence from a number of young women who had been sexually assaulted by Mark Lester, some when they were as young as six-years old. The other element of the trial related to an incident on 21 January 2015, when Mark Lester entered a home in Bridgwater, disguised with a balaclava and armed with a knife, tied up the two occupants, one of whom was a child of nine and sexually assaulted the child. A large manhunt followed, and evidence gathered as a result of the extensive investigation included: CCTV identification both lay and expert, DNA, voice recognition and hand comparison and computer evidence, both of searches made by Lester, but also of voyeuristic images taken and stored by him. Having pleaded to the image counts at the start of the trial, he was convicted unanimously of every other count.
Sentencing him to life imprisonment with a tariff of 18 years, HHJ Picton said that ‘he targeted those children and abused them, to a greater or lesser extent, in order to satisfy his powerful paedophile urges. The more vulnerable the child the further the defendant was able to go in terms of offending against them. He used grooming and isolation in order to obtain power over the least protected of these children, and he was thereby able to gain a degree of control which permitted him to indulge his criminal desires. He delighted in recording some of his activity by way of photographing and filming the children. Their vulnerability in the still and moving images that the jury had to see is chilling. They were at his mercy and he showed them none. When he is to be released is a matter for the parole board, but I would expect them to exercise the greatest degree of caution before allowing the defendant to live again within the community because I assess that his paedophile tendencies, and his preparedness to act upon those in a violent and terrifying way, are unlikely to change within the foreseeable future, if ever’.
Click here to read the BBC news report.
