'Dangerous' Wakefield prisoner attacked inmate with chair leg because of his crimes
A ‘dangerous’ prisoner attacked a fellow inmate with a chair leg, telling a pal that he had “split his wig clean open”.
Christopher Hartley, who was given a lengthy jail sentence for a savage and bloody attack during a house burglary in 2014, attacked the fellow lag at HMP Wakefield without warning.
Prosecutor Eleanor Fry told Leeds Crown Court that the victim had been walking along the balcony area of the prison on the afternoon September 3, 2023, carrying a tray of food.
Hartley then appeared behind him and struck him at least five times with the chair leg that had a metal hinge attached to the end.
He then threw the chair leg onto the safety netting on the concourse. The victim suffered lacerations to his head and another behind his ear.
Miss Fry said he was “very lucky they were not as serious as they could have been”.
In a letter found in Hartley’s cell that he was due to send to an acquaintance, he suggested he wanted to attack prisoners who had committed the most heinous crimes.
The 36-year-old said it was “D-day” for the victim and said he had “f***** him up proper good”.
He refused to be interviewed but in a note to the governor said he was “110 per cent guilty” of the attack.
The court heard that Hartley had 28 convictions for 59 offences.
Most seriously, he was jailed for 14 years for the aggravated burglary in which him and two others broke into a home.
They demanded money from the terrified 79-year-old woman, then attacked her son with a knife while he was sleeping in his bed.
Hartley was also convicted of starting a fire in his cell in HMP Wakefield with an electronic vape in 2020.
Mitigating, Peter Gilmour said Hartley had an “appalling background”, having been expelled from the school by the age of nine and due to mistreatment, he would run away from home and sit in hospitals where he felt safe.
He said that Hartley had lived in a “cycle of drugs and violence”. Now at HMP Garth in Lancashire, he said Hartley had been in the segregation unit for “some time”.
Judge Tom Bayliss KC told Hartley: “You are an extremely dangerous man. You are approaching a situation that any further offence of violence in a prison setting, then life is a likely sentence.”
He gave him an extended eight-year sentence, made up of four years’ custody and a four-year licence period.
It will run consecutively to his existing sentence.