A poo-thrower who punched two nurses in the face hid under a prison room table as a judge sent him down for more than two years.
Matias Marquez-Murua, 42, who was being sentenced over the video link from HMP Bullingdon, remained silent as Judge Nigel Daly jailed him for 26 months on Friday afternoon.
Earlier, faced with two empty chairs on the TV screen, Judge Daly told the prosecution barrister: “I understand that even though we can’t see Mr Marquez-Murua on the link he is in fact in the link room at Bullingdon.
“He is presently under the table, which is why we can’t see him.”
Prosecutor Nigel Ogborne confirmed he’d seen the defendant come into the prison video link room then ‘put himself underneath the table’.
On Wednesday, jurors at Oxford Crown Court found Marquez-Murua guilty of causing actual bodily harm and three charges of assaulting emergency workers.
The trial heard he'd thrown lukewarm coffee over a detention officer at Abingdon police station, after he was arrested in early September for stealing a bicycle.
Later that month, on September 21, he punched an NHS nurse so hard in the face that he broke her spectacles and forced the splintered glass into her eye.
Just a week later, on September 29, he punched another female nurse then struck a male healthcare assistant who came to his colleague’s aid. He was put in an isolation room, which he covered with his own excrement.
Marquez-Murua, who was not represented during the trial, did not give any evidence in his own defence.
On Tuesday, Judge Daly went down to the cells to warn the defendant that he did not have to give evidence but jurors might form an inference from his silence. He bellowed a song from behind his cell door by way of reply.
A psychiatric report obtained by the court found that Marquez-Murua was fit to stand trial. He suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and anti-social behaviour disorder.
Since coming to the UK in 1995 with his mother, the Spanish national had a history of drug abuse and psychiatric ill-health that had seen him receive hospital treatment.
Sentencing him to a total of 26 months, Judge Daly said he was taking into account the defendant’s mental health difficulties.
The judge said: “It seems to me you repeatedly assault emergency workers when they are trying to help you.”
Marquez-Murua had a number of previous convictions for assaults, including a 15 month suspended prison sentence in 2015 for causing actual bodily harm.
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