Assault victim calls for rethink over prisoner early releases

"He must have been out for, I don't know how long - a matter of days, maybe a week, max - and he's gone out and done it again."

Emily, a 21-year-old student, was walking home alone on a Friday night in Sheffield in April when she was approached and attacked by a man who, it later emerged, had been released early from prison.

"I was two minutes away from home and this person had followed me and completely assaulted me. He just attacked me," she recalls.

Emily's attacker, Matthew Ward, 21, of Wilfred Drive in Darnall, had previously been jailed for 22 months after committing a similar offence in Nottingham in 2025.

However, he was freed early from prison under a scheme launched as part of a bid to ease unprecedented overcrowding.

"After the police reviewed the footage and had seen what had happened, the story just unravelled and they recognised him straight away because he had just been released from prison," Emily says.

She is now calling for the government to protect others from going through what she did and reconsider planned changes to the early release of offenders.

Emily says that due to the extent of her injuries she cannot remember much of the assault she suffered at Ward's hands that night.

"I remember mid-way through thinking, 'What the hell is going on? What's happening?'

"Then, all of a sudden, I just remember waking up in the ambulance. I have no recollection of what happened."

Emily's parents became worried after they received a muffled voicemail from their daughter, tracked her phone and saw it was not moving towards her student house.

After calling the phone several times and speaking to a male voice but not to Emily, her parents then drove to Sheffield.

"We had a gut feeling something was wrong," remembers Emily's mother, Tracy.

"I said, 'Is Emily there?' and he said, 'I'm trying to get her phone to her, she's lost her phone'."

Neither Emily nor her family had known that following the assault and subsequent phone call, Ward had put Emily's phone in a bin.

Tracy says she began searching the area for her daughter before being told by Emily's housemate that she had returned home, but was badly injured.

"As soon as I saw her, I didn't know what to think. I didn't recognise her at all," Tracy says.

"I didn't even know if she was alive when I first saw her and then I immediately phoned for an ambulance.

"Her face was totally swollen and she didn't look like her and also she was so out of it that she wasn't really answering the questions. I honestly did think she had been seriously brain damaged."

Emily says she remains "angry" at the decision to release Ward early from prison, meaning he could then go on to attack her.

"I'm angry, because who deemed him safe to be released?" she asks.

"He's come out and within a matter of days and done it again.

"We later found out he had just been in prison for a previous attack on a woman and he got convicted for assault and suffocation."

Under the current early release scheme, offenders with standard fixed sentences can be released after serving 50% of their sentence.

But under the new Sentencing Act set to come into force in September, some 6,000 criminals were due to be released at varying stages, with one part of the plan meaning most jailed offenders on fixed terms would leave jail after serving a third of their term behind bars, rather than at the half-way point.

However, last week, following a backlash from survivors and victims, Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced he was pausing the scheme, which in its first phase would have seen about 700 prisoners with standard fixed sentences freed in September.

On Monday, the prime minister also ordered that prisoners jailed for rape, serious child sex and other grooming offences would barred from the upcoming changes to prison sentences.

Ward was later sentenced at Sheffield Crown Court to 30 months for Actual Bodily Harm for the attack on Emily, and a 10-year restraining order was also put in place.

Both Tracy and Emily say there needs to be greater consideration when considering offenders for early release.

"It needs to be looked at a lot more carefully because some of these people just simply aren't safe to be released and that's proven in what's just happened," says Emily.

Meanwhile, Tracy says: "I was angry enough when I read there'd been history of him doing a very, very similar attack before.

"I thought, 'How has he been let out to do this? How is nobody monitoring where he is?'

"To find out he'd been let out so early from a 22-month sentence just beggars belief."

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) said pausing the planned changes to the early release scheme until October would give probation staff time to plan for releases and ensure that victims could have a say in restrictions placed on offenders.

The prime minister had "insisted" that offenders faced "tough new surveillance" after leaving prison, according to the MoJ.

There would be a presumption that all offenders would be tagged, there would be tougher periods of supervision and there would be "robust" new rules, including restriction zones for offenders, the MoJ said.

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