A teen girl found guilty of manslaughter in connection with Keith Green’s death walked from court with a youth rehabilitation order.

The 16-year-old, who cannot be identified after Judge Ian Pringle KC refused to lift the reporting restriction protecting her anonymity, opened the side gate to 40-year-old Mr Green’s Howard Road home – allowing his murderers Mark Meadows and Travis Gorton to lie in wait near the shed where he was stabbed to death.

Sentencing the girl at Oxford Crown Court this morning, Judge Pringle said the girl had played a ‘minor role’ in the ‘desperately sorry and tragic incident’ on the eve of Valentine’s Day last year.

READ MORE: Moving tribute from Keith Green's mother

He told the girl, who sat in the dock beside a social worker and wearing a black jersey: “Your part in this matter is wholly different to that against your co-defendants.

“I am quite satisfied that the part you played on February 13 last year was simply to carry out [Louise Grieve’s] instructions to unbolt the side gate, which gave entrance to the garden and therefore the outhouse in which Keith Green was residing.

“In my view, that was a minor role and I am also quite satisfied that if you hadn’t unlocked the gate, Meadows and Gorton would simply have got over it or accessed the outhouse in some other way.

“They were determined to have the meeting with Keith Green that night.”

Having carried out Grieve’s instructions, the youth took no further part in the killing.

Judge Pringle said the youth had been ‘turned against’ Mr Green ‘by other adults who should never have involved you in their private affairs.'

During the trial last year, jurors heard that Mr Green was stabbed to death by love rival Mark Meadows, 25, and the latter’s 20-year-old brother Travis Gorton in the garden of his Banbury home. The two knifemen, who fled to Meadows’ home on the other side of town, were given life sentences for murder earlier this month.

Mr Green’s partner Louise Grieve, 38, had been in an on and off affair with Meadows, with prosecutors saying the lovers' intention was to 'get rid' of him. Jurors acquitted Grieve of murder but found her guilty of manslaughter. She was jailed for eight years.

READ MORE: Live updates from Banbury murder sentencing 

Today, Friday, January 20, Judge Pringle said the child was in a lower category in the Sentencing Council guidelines for manslaughter than Grieve.

The judge placed the youth’s role in the lowest category. For an adult, that would carry a starting point of a year’s imprisonment.

“Of course that’s dealing with an adult,” he said. The girl in the dock was 15 when she was involved in the incidents that led up to Mr Green’s death.

The judge quoted from a comprehensive pre-sentence report compiled by Oxfordshire’s Youth Offending Team.

In it, the officer said of the child: “The factors that reduce [her] culpability are her young age, her minor role in events, the involvement and the manipulation of her by adults, her life experiences which have included witnessing domestic abuse, parental criminality, substance misue, neglect, lack of parental support and…repeated trauma.”

Those factors meant he could take an ‘exceptional’ course and impose a two year youth rehabilitation order.

The youth dabbed tears from her eyes as she was told that the order would require her to remain under the supervision of the youth offending team for two years, complete up to 15 rehabilitation activity requirement days and abide by a two month curfew.

Earlier, defence barrister Peter Doyle KC said his client had expressed genuine remorse. The judge was urged to ignore ‘uninformed public clamour that this young girl lose her liberty by some form of custodial term’.

In mitigation, Mr Doyle said the youth had tried to ‘better herself’ by taking qualifications. There was ‘much good in this young girl’, he added, who during the trial she had stayed up through the night to help a suicidal young man at the care facility she was bailed to.

At the end of Friday's hearing, Judge Pringle refused an application from the Oxford Mail for reporting restrictions to be lifted, which would have allowed the youth defendant to be named and the full circumstances of Mr Green’s murder to be reported.

Accepting the youth was trying to rehabilitate herself, he said: “It is not in the public interest for the publication of [her name]. I do not see there is any purpose served in having her name published."

Read more from this author

This story was written by Tom Seaward. He joined the team in 2021 as Oxfordshire's court and crime reporter.  

To get in touch with him email: Tom.Seaward@newsquest.co.uk

Follow him on Twitter: @t_seaward