This is an extract from Tom Seaward's weekly newsletter Court news: The inside scoop which you can sign up to for free here.

This might surprise you, but I don’t particularly like reporting on the same people again and again.

If I recognise you, it’s not a good sign.

As a cub reporter I used to spend a lot of time in youth court.

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You’d see the same faces time and again; then, usually, there came a point when you’d never see them again.

They might have moved on to a new city, less commonly they’d been locked up for something very serious, but usually it was because they had grown up.

In the nicest possible way, it was lovely to not see them again.

The criminal justice system has twin stars, or two purposes. To punish and to rehabilitate.

Oxford Mail: Andrew Robinson at Oxford's court Andrew Robinson at Oxford's court

The longer I spend covering the courts, the more important the second star becomes.

Andrew Robinson featured relatively regularly in my diary when I first started as a reporter in Oxford.

The police had managed to get a criminal behaviour order making it an arrestable offence to do lots of the things he tended to do. (That is not to say he did not get arrested for things everyone is prevented from doing by the law. He did).

Alcohol was Mr Robinson’s most immediate problem; but it was matched by serious physical and mental ill-health.

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On any view, Mr Robinson was a serious offender. His rap sheet – with more than 650 offences on it – remains the worst I have ever come across.

And then suddenly, seemingly inexplicably, he just stopped featuring in the court lists. There were dribs and drabs of offences, but nothing like the old, regular deluge.

So, what happened?

The answer, Oxford Crown Court heard this week, was that he got very poorly then got better – thanks in large part to the brilliant intervention of a specialist, alcohol-free care home.

That didn’t stop the Crown Prosecution Service from prosecuting him for two assaults on police officers – including one that saw him throw his breakfast at an officer in the police station – and a racially aggravated harassment.

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There have been a number of court hearings since the end of last year relating to Mr Robinson. I've been to all of them, but until this week couldn't publish anything.

At each hearing, the judge has asked the CPS to review the matter and think hard about whether it was really in the public interest to prosecute a man who, because of his alcoholism couldn’t remember the caught-on-CCTV offences, and was finally getting his life on track.

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They duly reviewed it and decided - after each time the judge questioned whether it was in the public interest to proceed – that it was.

Their persistence was rewarded on Thursday, when the judge imposed a conditional discharge.