R v Tina McDonagh

Facts

The appellant, Tina McDonagh, entered shops in Coventry with a female friend on 9 April 2025, twice on 23 April 2025 and again on 7 May 2025, stealing goods worth £1,030, £855, £40 and £480 respectively. On 7 July 2025, the day of her trial, she pleaded guilty at the Coventry Magistrates' Court to four charges of theft. The offences placed her in breach of a suspended sentence of nine months' imprisonment, suspended for 18 months, imposed by the Crown Court on 1 August 2024 for earlier shop thefts committed in May 2023, in which goods worth £4,000, £691.50 and £1,111.30 had been taken. The magistrates first sentenced her to 23 weeks' imprisonment and purported to re-activate 21 weeks of the suspended sentence, but they had no power to activate a Crown Court suspended sentence; on realising the error they re-opened the sentences under section 142 of the Magistrates' Court Act 1980 and remitted both the theft offences and the breach to the Crown Court. On 8 September 2025 HHJ Thomas Rochford, sitting in the Crown Court at Warwick, sentenced her to 48 weeks' imprisonment for the four thefts and activated the suspended sentence in full. She appealed against sentence as manifestly excessive with the leave of the single judge.