Lurgan teenager given four-month custody term for resisting police after he was peppered sprayed
A young Co Armagh man, who was pepper sprayed by police, has been sentenced to four months in custody for resisting an officer.
Christopher McCord, aged 18, from Ailsbury Gardens, Lurgan, appeared before Craigavon Magistrates Court charged with resisting police on November 18 last year.
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His barrister, Mr Conor Lunny, said the defendant has been in custody since the incident and has already served four-and-a-half months on remand.
The deputy district judge said this had ended up as a resisting offence but Mr Lunny agreed it had been a “good bit more serious”.
The court heard that at around 4.50am on November 18 last year, police were called to an ‘ongoing domestic’.
A police officer ‘tried to engage’ with the defendant but eventually started to walk away from police and was ‘continually aggressive’.
One officer deployed PAVA spray which is a synthetic pepper spray, also known as an incapacitant spray, used by officers to temporarily incapacitate individuals without causing serious harm.
"Police made chase and he resisted one of the officers," a prosecutor told the court, adding McCord told police during interview that he had no recollection of the incident.
Mr Lunny reminded the judge of his client’s early plea. “It started off as a far more serious incident,” said the barrister, who said there had been a certain amount of upheaval in McCord’s life.
The defendant returned to his parent’s house where “tempers were frayed for a while” which Mr Lunny said resulted in “the flare up of this incident”.
McCord was sentenced to four months in custody.