A BARRISTER who dodged paying thousands of pounds in rail fares for more than two-and-a-half years was spared prison yesterday.

Peter Barnett made hundreds of journeys from Thame to London’s Marylebone station without paying the full fare.

Instead he pretended to have only travelled from Wembley, north west London, paying just for the short trip in the capital.

The 44-year-old, of Whittle Road, Thame, was caught when he was stopped by a ticket inspector at Marylebone, claiming to have travelled from Wembley instead of Haddenham & Thame Parkway.

City of London Magistrates’ Court heard that Barnett had received a conditional caution in 2010 for a similar offence.

But the father-of-three avoided jail when a judge gave him a prison sentence of 16 weeks, suspended for 12 months.

Alongside his suspended sentence, Barnett was ordered to pay £5,892.70, carry out 200 hours of unpaid work and be supervised for 12 months.

Deputy District Judge Olalekan Omotosho told him his serial fare-skipping was a “serious offence”.

She added: “There is a need not just to punish you for the offences but also deter others from committing offences.

“It is a shame, really, because you had it all. It remains unclear why you acted so badly. You let yourself down and your family down, particularly in light of your profession as a lawyer.”

The court was told Barnett – a former Oxford graduate and Rhodes scholar who also worked in the financial services sector – failed to pay for journeys on Chiltern Railways on 655 days between April 2012 and November 2014.

Prosecutors argued he should pay back £19,689, the full value of the cost of daily returns for the trips he made.

Richard Doolan told the court: “The obligations of a person using the train must be to have a valid ticket for the whole of their journey, any time they want to travel.”

But Angus Bunyan, defending, claimed that value equated to the penalty imposed by the railway company, rather than a true value that the criminal court should consider.

And he said it was “common sense” that Barnett would not have paid for daily trips he dodged, but rather for a weekly ticket, so should not pay back based on a daily amount.