Fury at fine for man who punched sons' 'dealer'

A businessman who attacked a man he claimed was selling heroin to his sons insisted yesterday that he had no regrets over his actions.

Roger Dorrington, aged 48, was ordered by Southampton Crown Court to complete 100 hours' community service and pay £250 compensation after pleading guilty to assault occasioning actual bodily harm. "This is not justice," he said. "I would rather pay any charity than give him a penny. I do not have any regrets."

His MP, Desmond Swayne, criticised the sentence. "It's shocking. If it was my children, I would have garrotted him with his own intestines," said the Conservative MP for New Forest West. "Have the courts gone mad?"

Dorrington said his sons Joseph and Nick, now 21 and 20, had begun taking drugs as teenagers. He told the court on Friday that last June he had caught James White, 24, with heroin inside his home in Blissford, New Forest, having banned him from the house.

Mr White fled, but Dorrington found him and punched him 15 times in the face.

Dorrington said yesterday: "James White was in my house cutting up drugs and supplying them in my bedroom. I thought I had some justification to remove him from my property."