Armed robbery driver spared prison.

Byline: Malcolm Pickering

An armed robbery getaway driver has been spared from jail after turning Queen's Evidence.

Judge Peter Bowers, sitting at Teesside Crown Court, said he was satisfied that Jonathan Caley, 25, "would not be safe" in prison - and suspended his two-year sentence for two years.

The judge told him: "Keep your nose clean and don't come back."

The court heard Caley was the key witness in a case earlier this month which saw the sawn-off shotgun team of Shane Round, 31 and Peter Caswell, 52, jailed

Round, formerly of Meadowfield Avenue, Middlesbrough, received seven-and-a-half years on top of an existing ten-year term for another robbery.

Caswell, of The Crescent, Linthorpe, was given 11 years.

Both had pleaded guilty at the eleventh hour to taking part in the armed raid at the Thornaby Ex Serviceman's Club in May last year.

Caley had pleaded guilty to assisting an offender by being the getaway driver on the club raid but, said prosecutor Shaun Dodds, he had co-operated with police from his arrest, maintaining that he had no idea what the two men had planned to do in the club and that when they came out with the gun he had no option but to drive away.

He told police: "I was terrified. Peter was repeatedly banging the gun on the back of my head.

"I had two lunatics in my car with a loaded shotgun. They told me to drive so I drove."

Defence barrister Rod Hunt said that Caley was constantly under threat of violence from Middlesbrough's underworld and that his co-operation with the police had cost him a great deal, having to be under police protection as a result of being a witness in the case.

Mr Hunt said there was clear evidence that he did not know what the other two men were going to do and by the time he found out there was not much he could do about it.