SENTENCING STATEMENTS

On sentencing Lord Arthurson made the following remarks in court:

"Felix Winter, on 21 February 2025 you tendered pleas of guilty by way of accelerated section 76 procedure to a two charge indictment libelling a complex multi‑part offence of breach of the peace, with an accompanying racial aggravation, and a separate but related offence under section 58(1)(a) and (b) of the Terrorism Act 2000.  The court has subsequently obtained a criminal justice social work report and a risk assessment report prepared by a consultant forensic psychologist who is a specialised risk assessor accredited as such by the Risk Management Authority.  A variety of further reports are also available, obtained at the instance of your senior counsel and other professionals involved in this anxious and highly unusual case.

The index offending libelled was committed by you between 1 June 2022 and 31 July 2023, when you were aged between 15 and 16 and a pupil at the High School referred to in each of the charges on the present indictment (hereinafter referred to as “the School”).  You are now aged 18.  You have no criminal antecedents of any kind.

A detailed and lengthy agreed factual narrative was read into the record on the date of your first appearance in this court.  I do not propose to rehearse that extensive material this afternoon.  Suffice to say, the gravamen of the offending in this case relates to you making known to others your desire and plans to carry out acts of violence involving firearms, explosive devices and poison against pupils and teachers at the School.  You additionally showed certain material, including videos of mass shootings, to your fellow pupils, which material contained footage taken from the notorious mass shooting in 1999 at Columbine High School in Colorado, USA.  You stated your intention to acquire a 3‑D printer in order to manufacture a firearm for use in the commission by you of acts of violence at the School.  Your mode of dress in person and on TikTok videos posted by you resembled those responsible for the mass shooting at Columbine High School.  On one occasion you dressed in a tactical vest and helmet whilst in possession of an imitation firearm within the School.  You further made a record of, and possessed, documents or records containing information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism, namely the manufacture of explosive substances and devices, the manufacture of cyanide and the conversion of a handgun, in a notebook and by way of PDF instructions and video files.

You were a member of a pro‑Nazi “Discord” group and appear to have in effect become radicalised in that online community within which you were thoroughly immersed.  At the heart of your offending in this case lay your desire to perpetrate a school shooting similar to the Columbine event with which you appear to have become obsessed.  You discussed placing bombs in the cafeteria and library at the School and then shooting people as they ran out of the building.  You discussed potential dates for the attack and indicated to one fellow pupil that you had in mind specific individuals, some of whom you would spare and some of whom you would kill.  A cybercrime investigation led to the recovery of significant quantities of video footage relating to school shootings, including some 65 user generated videos which you had manipulated in order to glamourise the Columbine shooting.  Your mobile phone also contained a number of user generated videos of the School including a clip capturing you walking along a corridor in the School in a way thought to mimic the actions of the Columbine shooters.  “Gore” videos were also recovered, in which real people are executed and dead and mutilated bodies are shown.

You told one witness that you had lied throughout your police interview in summer 2023, telling them that your school shooting discussions were all just fantasy.  Your third Prevent referral connected to this case, made as recently as 20 February 2025, the day before your pleas of guilty were tendered in this court, arose due to concerns at the college that you were then attending whereby you brought the indictment into the college and made an alleged comment that you were annoyed that you had been caught.  You had earlier been made the subject of Prevent referrals on 11 November 2022 and on 20 June 2023, that last referral closing only in December 2024.  This means that you have been subject to Prevent intervention in 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.

The risk assessment report notes your evolving and visceral violent fantasy about harming those you considered to be bullying you by way of the perpetration by you of a school shooting massacre.  Your plans featured a level of detail including what you would wear and what songs you would listen to.  On the TRAP‑18 assessment tool (Terrorist Radicalisation Assessment Protocol) evidence was found during the offending period of four of the eight proximal warning behaviours, which reflected that the risk of an attack by you was increasing at that time.

The assessor reports that entries in your journal make reference to shooting people at school in the head and specifically to shooting their brains out.  In January 2023 you stated that the School was “a virus upon this earth” and that “everyone should look at me as if I’m a god better because I fucking am and I’ll prove that fucking soon”.  Between February and April 2023 you wrote in one entry that “my need for killing is getting worse…all you fuckers need to die and soon you will”.  Between April and May 2023 you wrote “the bombs go off in peak of lunch capacity where most people sit/stand” and “I want to cage the lot of you and spray you with gas then burn you”.  In May 2023 you detail your “plan so far”, which sets out plans to leave weapons in a car boot as well as in the School, plant bombs set to go off at 11.30am when the School is at maximum capacity and to secure the exits with bike locks.  Reference is made to nail bombs, pipe bombs and propane bombs.  You stated your intention to move through the School with guns and bombs to “kill as many as we can”.  The journal contains a pipe bomb recipe, a playlist of songs and a kitlist of clothes and accessories.  The last page of your journal contains what appears to be a drawing of the top floor of a school with footprints going down the corridor and makes reference to “trapped targets” inside.  The assessor is of the view that you identified with the perpetrators of the American school shootings upon which you had become fixated and that you increasingly saw yourself as a “warrior”.  It is of note that you asked a witness to keep your journal in order to prevent the police obtaining it.  That witness did so, but only for a period of days before returning it to you.

The risk assessor has proceeded after full analysis to reach the conclusion that the risk of you engaging in an attack has now reduced.  She states that it is arguable that you have been, and can continue to be, on a journey of disengagement and that therefore your enduring risk to the public has reduced.  The assessor highlights, very properly, that you were of course a child at the time of these events.  She concludes that whilst lifelong measures are not necessary in this case, a lengthy supervision period would be of benefit in order for certain particular risk management strategies to be put in place, and observes that this would help to provide assurances that you are continuing on the process of disengagement into adulthood.  There do not appear to be any current proximal warning behaviours to indicate that the risk or threat of an attack is likely or imminent at present, the assessor reports.  She is optimistic that you are amenable to change and that with appropriate support and monitoring you can continue with your journey of disengagement.  You have, it is further reported, engaged well with the interventions of professionals since your arrest in 2023 and you appear to have understood the harm which you have caused.

The assessor ascribes to you a low risk level in terms of the Risk Management Authority Standards and Guidelines.  This in terms means that her professional concluded view is that the nature, seriousness and pattern of your behaviour suggests a capacity to seriously endanger the lives, physical or psychological well‑being of the public at large, but that there is no apparent long-term or persistent motivation or propensity to do so.  While you have engaged in harmful behaviour, with arguable potential for serious harm to occur, you have however evidenced that there are protective factors which can mitigate risk;  that you are likely to respond to intervention and are amenable to supervision;  and, that while you do have characteristics which are problematic and persistent, these can and have been adequately addressed and managed by existing services and measures.  You do not, in short, require life‑long restrictions in order to minimise the risk of serious harm to others.  The right action was, the assessor states, taken at the point when concerns were acute and when your risk was arguably increasing.  You have disengaged from your online community and extremist violent ideology.  You have responded well to intervention and supervision requirements.

I have listened with care to the cogent and comprehensive submissions of your senior counsel advanced in mitigation on your behalf, both today and in the course of the two previous hearings of this case in this court.  In particular I note what has been said in the course of all of these submissions by senior counsel regarding your status as a vulnerable young person with certain particular mental health difficulties and your additional particular vulnerabilities, all as referred to in various reports;  your early childhood trauma and its effect;  the trigger for your conduct and the impact of and causation in respect of autism;  your considerable progress made since 2023;  your expressed remorse and empathy;  your age at the time of the index offending and today and the consequent engagement of the Young People Sentencing Guideline; the cause of your offending being the bullying that you were subject to; the online grooming that you were subject to in the Discord group; and your positive response to interventions, as evidenced in the criminal justice social work report and in recent psychology and adoption social work reports. Senior counsel referred in particular to the terms of the risk assessment report at paras 2.1, 2.5, 3.9.2, 3.14.5 and 6, 3.16.3 and 5, 4.2.1, 4.3.1, 4.4.1, and 4.5.1 to 3.

In conclusion senior counsel invited the court to impose a maximum length community payback order to provide the required supervision in your case. This would allow you to continue to engage with professionals and resume your college attendance. To impose detention would in effect amount to the court requiring you to stand still and wait for your release before any meaningful work can recommence. It was submitted that although a qualifying offence for the imposition of an extended sentence, with discount for the early plea and in light of the English Guidelines, it would simply not be possible for the court to consider the imposition of the required 4 year threshold sentence in respect of charge two which would permit the imposition of such a disposal. It was further submitted, at some length, that, the terms of the libel in charge one having been agreed and focussing on that libel alone, no offence inferring personal violence could be considered to be averred therein. Crown counsel has indeed, for the record, confirmed that he does not dispute that latter proposition.

Turning finally to disposal, it is plain from the gravity of the offending before the court in this highly unusual case that only a substantial custodial sentence is appropriate. Any community-based disposal or short-term custodial sentence with a 12 month supervised release period would simply not be appropriate. Notwithstanding the whole available corpus of risk assessment-related material, upon which basis I would otherwise have proposed imposing upon you today an extended sentence, I have reached the conclusion, based on the cogent reasons proferred by your senior counsel, that such a disposal is simply, standing the libelled terms of the plea agreed between senior counsel and the Crown, not available to the court in this case.  

The index offending in your case comprised a contemplated mass shooting event at a particular school, all accompanied by detailed narrative of exactly how this prospective massacre was to be perpetrated by you. You joined an online extremist community, the pro‑Nazi Discord group.  On your own account you spent a minimum of 2 hours per day interacting with community members for a period of at least 2 years, equating to a minimum period of 1456 hours.  You became radicalised.  You discussed with pupils at the School what the risk assessor has characterised as your evolving, visceral and violent but graphically detailed plans to commit a mass shooting at the School, selecting which pupils and teachers you would kill and which you would spare.  You had desensitised yourself to violence by way of appalling “gore” material, featuring executions of real people.  You kept records in a notebook and in PDF form in relation to the manufacture of explosive devices and substances, the manufacture of cyanide and the conversion of a handgun.  At paragraph 4.3.1 of the risk assessor’s report the author states the following: “The key concern in Mr Winter’s case is whether he would have followed through on his violent fantasy had he not been arrested in July 2023.  This is tricky to answer definitively as there were a number of proximal warning behaviours present which would indicate the threat of an attack was increasing.  There were, however, some key warning behaviours absent and it does not appear that Mr Winter had the means to carry out an attack.”

Let me speak plainly.  The whole material available to me indicates that it is at least arguable that you were progressing towards the brink of perpetrating a mass school shooting at the School at which you yourself were a pupil.  You were radicalised and your statements of intent could not have been clearer.  Your violent ideation undoubtedly grew in its intensity from early 2022 through to summer 2023. You had additionally taken steps to possess records containing information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.  While you did not yet have the means to carry out an attack on the School, and of course some key warning signs were absent, these steps would indicate to me that your plans had become a degree more operationalised, as it were. It is further of note that you asked a witness to retain your journal and told her that you had lied to the police at your interview.  It is alleged that even in February this year you expressed your annoyance that you had been caught.  The risk assessor finds the key concern or question in the case, regarding follow‑through by you, as “tricky to answer definitively”.  You have been the subject of Prevent engagement in 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.

 In these whole circumstances I now sentence you as follows.  This was a prolonged, deeply disturbing and apparently escalating course of criminal conduct embarked upon by you, albeit as a very young person, that course of conduct encompassing the whole conduct libelled on the indictment. You will accordingly serve, on an in cumulo basis, in respect of charges 1 and 2 on this indictment a sentence of 6 years detention, discounted from 8 years due to the timing and utility of your pleas of guilty, taking into account the gap between your appearance on petition and the section 76 letter. Had I been sentencing you on each charge separately, the respective headline custodial components would have been 7 years for charge 1 and 2 years for charge 2.  It further, of course, goes perhaps without saying that the headline and discounted custodial tariffs selected in this sentencing exercise would have been considerably greater had I been sentencing you as an adult

Finally, and for the avoidance of doubt, I confirm that this sentence will be backdated to 21 February 2025, being the date of your conviction on this indictment and your subsequent remand into custody in these proceedings."

30 July 2025