Craig Sweeney

Craig John Sweeney (born 1981 in South Glamorgan) is a Welsh child sex offender, from Newport, Gwent.

Public criticism of Sweeney's sentence voiced by Home Secretary John Reid prompted the House of Commons Constitutional Affairs Committee to recommend that the Ministerial Code be amended with guidelines to govern the public comments of ministers about individual judges to reinforce the provisions within the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. The Committee wrote: "The Sweeney case was the first big test of whether the new relationship between the Lord Chancellor [i.e. Lord Falconer] and the judiciary was working properly, and it is clear that there was a systemic failure." In 2008, Lord Phillips, the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, announced that in response to "widespread inaccurate media coverage" of Sweeney's sentencing, five judges were being trained to be the first official media spokesmen for the judiciary.

Crime

Craig Sweeney was found guilty of the abduction and sexual assault of a three-year-old girl. He was known to the victim's family, whom he had befriended weeks before the crime. Sweeney was released on licence in late 2005 after serving a term in jail for indecently assaulting a six-year-old in April 2003. While on licence, he was accused of inappropriately touching a child's bottom, but the police and probation workers did not return him to prison, despite his "risk of harm" being raised to "high".