A ‘sexual predator’ who picked up a married man outside a Chelsea bar then drove to his chocolate box Cotswolds cottage has had three years wiped from his jail sentence.
Senior judges at the Court of Appeal in London said the judge who jailed Luiz da Silva Neto for 22 years for drugging and sexually assaulting two men in Oxfordshire village Middle Barton had failed to take account of the fairness of the overall sentence.
Reducing the overall jail term from 22 years to 19, Lord Justice Davis said: “This man at the end of 2021 engaged in a brief course of conduct involving sexually predatory behaviour.
“It had to be reflected by a substantial sentence. But in our judgment, the sentence imposed failed to reflect the appropriate proportionality that had to be achieved.”
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Judge Michael Gledhill KC told the Brazilian man he had ‘become a sexual predator’ as he jailed him last July.
Jurors at Oxford Crown Court convicted him of administering drugs to two victims in November and December 2021 and sexually assaulting them.
He was cleared of other offences, including kidnapping the second man, admitted personal possession of a ‘party bag’ of illegal drugs that had been found in his car in October 2021.
One of his had gone down to the cottage, which was leased as a holiday rental by Da Silva Neto and his partner, in order to help with DIY, the court was told.
Having fallen into a stupor after drinking Jägermeister with the defendant, the man woke to find he was naked and being molested by the cottage owner.
The second man was drinking with colleagues at Raffles bar in Chelsea’s Kings Road when he left, intending to get a taxi, then cancelled it after getting into Da Silva Neto’s car.
The defendant had spent the evening looking to pick up a man, the court heard.
The victim woke the following morning naked, in a stranger’s bed in Oxfordshire and, when he got into a taxi, discovered he was miles away from home.
In an impact statement, he said: “The sense of panic I felt that morning is indescribable.”
READ MORE: 22 years for Londoner who assaulted men at his Oxfordshire cottage
Judge Gledhill imposed 12 years’ imprisonment for the rape of the second man and a further 10 years for the sexual assault on the first.
On Tuesday (July 18), defence advocate Sallie Bennett-Jenkins KC told the Court of Appeal that the judge had imposed consecutive sentences for the offending against each of the two victims, but ‘without any apparent adjustment for totality’.
Judges would ordinarily reduce the prison terms for each offence where consecutive sentences were imposed in order to give a fair overall sentence.
Lawyers call that process having regard to ‘totality’.
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The barrister accepted that Judge Gledhill made ‘a passing reference to totality’.
But she added: “When one analyses the sentences passed and the fact that the two lead offences were of lengthy periods, we suggest that the concept has not been sufficiently nor proper allowance made for totality.”
Ms Bennett-Jenkins said that it ‘does not appear that any significant nor adequate’ reduction was made by the judge to take account his personal mitigation, previous good character and the lack of ‘aggravating features’ to the offending such as the use or threat of violence.
Giving the judgment of the panel of the three appeal judges, Lord Justice Davis said: “It is quite clear that the appellant’s offending was very serious indeed.
"It was very serious in respect of both victims, who were quite separate. The effect of the offending on them has been very substantial.
“But even where each victim suffers grievously from the offending, the requirement for the overall sentence to be proportionate remains.
“We’ve concluded the judge should have adjusted the overall sentence to take account of the principles of totality.”
He said it was ‘inevitable’ that meant the sentence imposed on a victim would be less than it would have been had they been the sole complainant.
“This is not to be taken as some kind of determination the relevant [offending] was not as serious as the victim quite rightly thinks it was,” he added.
Da Silva Neto appeared in court via video link from Dartmoor prison.
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