THE teenage vandal who sparked the events leading to Garry Newlove's murder has escaped the jail sentence magistrates vowed he would receive last month.

Tony Hempsall, aged 19, of Central Avenue, Orford, vandalised a digger parked outside the home of Mr Newlove's neighbour Charlie Ruddy, on Station Road North, last August, after drinking 20 bottles of lager.

Unemployed Hempsall, known as Roadzy, pleaded guilty to criminal damage when he appeared at Warrington Magistrates' Court in January.

Bench chairman Yvonne Potter warned him he faced prison as the crime was so serious that neither a fine nor a community order was satisfactory.

But at his sentencing on Thursday, Judge Brigid Knight handed him a community order with 40 hours unpaid work and a two-month curfew and banned him from Station Road and Station Road North for two years.

The judge said: "It is important that I spell out that I am not sentencing this defendant for any legal involvement in the murder of Garry Newlove.

"I am sentencing him for criminal damage under £5,000.

"Court powers are restricted in these circumstances to three months in custody and in the case of this defendant, who is now 19, the maximum any court could give him without credit for his guilty plea would be three months in a young offenders' institution."

Judge Knight said Hempsall had a caution for a public order offence and assaulting a police officer in 2006, and reprimands for criminal damage in 2005, but that this record was spent and he would be therefore treated as a first offender.

She said that the police investigation had proved beyond doubt' that, after trashing the digger, Hempsall had left Station Road North and had been at Jenerics chip shop at the time of the attack.

Hempsall said he had not known murderers Adam Swellings, Jordan Cunliffe and Stephen Sorton before that night.

However, Judge Knight said that Hempsall had been on police bail from August to January believing he was under suspicion of murder, and that vandalising the digger may have encouraged the others who later killed Mr Newlove to follow suit.

She said: "He was in a group and the danger of being in a group doing what he did is that others may be tempted on a copycat basis, or they may have dutch courage to also act."

David Robb, defending, said: "It is something he will have to live with for the rest of his life."

Sentencing Hempsall to the community order plus a payment of £56.50 compensation and £60 court costs, Judge Knight added: "All of that I would imagine is a greater penalty and a longer lasting penalty than any the court could impose."