TWO men who exchanged insults ended up in a doorstep confrontation that left one with a wound to his skull caused by a blow from a hatchet, a court heard.
Prosecutor Tom Cleeve told Bradford Crown Court that Harry Williams, 21, was in the garden of his home in The Crescent, Ilkley, on February 15, 2022, when an acquaintance drove by and stuck up two fingers at him.
The two exchanged words that led to what His Honour Judge Colin Burn described as “a dangerously stupid situation” as the car driver forced his way into Williams’s garden where he was chopping wood with a hatchet.
Williams’s mother tried to calm the escalating argument and both she and her son went inside. However the other man put his foot in the door to prevent it being closed at which point Williams struck him on the head with the hatchet.
The blow, which was caught on CCTV, caused a wound on the man’s forehead leaving the skull exposed.
When he was arrested Williams said he had acted in self-defence as the other man tried to get into his home and grabbed hold of his mother.
He later pleaded guilty to affray.
Mitigating, Ian Howard said Williams, who was 19 in 2022 and who had known the other man for some time and had got on with him, readily conceded that in using the hatchet he had “gone beyond what could reasonably be described as self-defence”.
He that he had been provoked, that the other man was “not entirely blameless” but added: “He got out of control very quickly, sadly.”
Judge Burn described the incident as “quite an unpleasant altercation” and that both men were “winding each other up”.
He accepted that Williams had been using the hatchet for an innocent purpose, and that his mother had sought to calm the incident as it escalated and the man was wounded.
Judge Burn said: “You need to bear in mind that not just he was lucky just having to have his head stitched up, but you were lucky as well because in the circumstances that were prevailing at the time, anything could have happened in relation to the injury that you gave him.”
He handed Williams an 18-month community order and ordered him to carry out 150 hours of unpaid work in the community.
Williams was also told to undertake 30 rehabilitation activity requirement days, which would help address his thinking skills, and to pay costs of £100.
The hatchet was ordered to be retained and disposed of.
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