A WOMAN has narrowly avoided a jail sentence after getting drunk and causing a disturbance in a beer garden while in charge of a child.

Ewelina Binkowska, 32, was told at North East Wales Magistrates Court how she was ‘a very lucky woman’ as she avoided being sent to prison after causing a scene and using threatening language at a pub garden in Flint last summer.

Binkowsa was brought before the courts in Mold after she was found guilty of using threatening words and behaviour to cause harassment and distress towards the landlady of the George and Dragon public house in Flint whilst in front of children and their families in the pub’s beer garden.

She was also charged with being drunk whilst in charge of a child – who cannot be named for legal reasons – on the same day, namely July 6 2019.

The Leader:

The George & Dragon pub in Flint

Rhian Jackson, prosecuting, told the court that pub landlady Lynda Leigh was working upstairs when she heard a woman shouting in both English and Polish in the pub’s beer garden on Church Street.

She went down to address the situation where she found Miss Binkowsa dancing and screaming at customers before directing her attention to the landlady who was asking her to leave.

Police were called and deemed that Binkowsa was ‘in no fit state to care for herself, let alone a child’.

With no other appropriate adult able to be identified at the time, the child was taken into the care of police protection and Binkowsa was arrested and her handbag seized from the pub – found to contain half a bottle of wine and an open can of beer.

Speaking on behalf of her client – who was assisted in court by a Polish interpreter – Emma Simoes said Binkowsa has not touched alcohol since the incident – which was proven by several random alcohol tests coming back with negative results.

District judge Anita Price said that Miss Binkowsa was ‘very lucky’ to be spared from a prison sentence and that she did not activate her suspended sentence following an offence in 2018.

Instead, she was handed a 12-month community order, a six-week curfew and a total of £440 in fines to pay to the court.”