This Is Guernsey

By Simon Tostevin

TWO teenage girls who lied when giving evidence in court narrowly escaped going to jail

Chanelle Norman, 18, and a 16-year-old girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, admitted perjury when they appeared before the Royal Court yesterday. They claimed that they had done it because they had been threatened.

Each of the girls was sentenced to 200 hours of community service.

Judge Russell Finch said not sentencing the pair to six months’ youth detention was an act of mercy and that the defendants’ youthfulness had played a part in the decision.

‘If you were a bit older you would have gone straight inside today.

‘You have escaped by the skin of your teeth, just by the skin of your teeth.

‘If you don’t do all the hours you will go down.

‘I will remember your faces and your names and I never want to see you here again.

‘It’s a very narrow escape and you can thank your lucky stars.’

They perjured themselves in the Magistrate’s Court in July.

It heard that the pair were back- seat passengers in a car that was involved in a high-speed police chase on 5 May.

When police caught the car, the driver ran off, but the two women were found nearby.

At the police station later that day they each gave a written statement saying that Randy Machon, Norman’s former boyfriend and father of her child, had been driving.

As a result Machon was charged with a number of motoring offences including dangerous driving, failing to stop and driving without insurance.

The matter went to court on 24 July, but when the younger woman, who was 15 at the time of the incident, entered the courtroom she said that she did not want to give evidence.

She was treated as a hostile witness but her recollection of the events was incoherent and she claimed that she had been drunk when she made her original statement to police.

Norman also claimed she had been drunk and that she had no recollection of what happened.

At one point she also said she had not been in the car.

As a result, the magistrate acquitted Mr Machon.

On 2 August, the younger of the pair was arrested and questioned on suspicion of committing perjury as was Norman on 30 August.

In interviews, the pair insisted they had been drunk when making their original statements.

However, on 23 October, Norman went to police and admitted that her statement of 5 May was the truth and that the reason she had failed to give proper evidence in court was because others had threatened her.

On 13 February, the younger woman also went to the police station and did the same.

She claimed she had been threatened and intimidated and did not want to be labelled ‘a grass’.

Advocates Chris Green and Rachel Eeles, who represented the two, argued that the offence was not highly sophisticated and that they had only chosen to take that cause of action because they were scared what might have happened to them if they had told the truth.