A MAN who broke a stranger’s jaw and threatened a district judge has been jailed for seven years.

Ian Starr picked a fight with a smaller, younger man in York, and left him so battered and bloodied the victim didn’t recognise himself in the mirror and his mother cried on seeing him, York Crown Court heard.

Andrew Semple, prosecuting, said Starr, 33, formerly of Sandringham Street, Acomb, and recently of Storey Close, Helmsley, also carried out a six-month harassment campaign against staff at York County Court where he was involved in a family court case.

Staff there logged hundreds of calls from him between January and June 2017, during many of which he reduced them to near tears by his aggression and insults.Sometimes they had to put the phone down on him. He threatened to come to the court to “sort things out”, wait outside for a district judge to come out and also said “I will burst in (to the judge’s room), I will come straight there, I don’t care who is with the judge, I will get it sorted”.

Judge Andrew Stubbs QC told Starr: “Despite the charming man that you are, plainly capable of being engaging, intelligent... you have a temper that you are simply unable to control.

“When things don’t go your way, your anger gets the better of you. You behave in a way that is both dangerous and unacceptable.”

He jailed Starr for seven years and made a restraining order banning him from going to York County Court other than for a pre-arranged appointment or hearing for the next 10 years.

Starr admitted harassing the county court staff, but denied wounding the smaller man with intent.

A jury convicted him of the wounding charge and acquitted him of assaulting the smaller man’s friend at the end of a trial during which Starr represented himself. The court heard the victim suffered a broken jaw, a black eye and facial injuries.

Starr nearly cried in the dock as he told the judge prison would lead to the loss of the house he had had for 15 years, cost him his job and have a major effect on his current partner’s life.

He had told the jury that shortly before the Clifton Green incident he had lost his father and a friend had lost an eye in a pub incident with a bottle.

In a personal statement the victim of the Clifton Green incident told how he had only moved to York a week or so before Starr subjected him to what the judge called a sustained attack.

He had to have a liquid diet for a couple of weeks and suffered pain for several more weeks, especially when cleaning his teeth.

“I didn’t know the man who assaulted me,” the statement said. “He was a complete stranger. I was just listening to music on a bench.”

The judge said after hearing the trial that the smaller man had hit Starr with a bottle. “The evidence seems to suggest you were working yourself up into a rage at the time,” he told Starr.

Starr had claimed to police as he was arrested that he was the victim. “You were not the victim, you were the aggressor,” the judge said.