A senior judge called yesterday on the police authorities to help prevent RUC officers taking the law into their own hands and attacking suspects.
The call by Mr Justice McLaughlin came as he jailed two policemen and fined another constable and a soldier £1,000 sterling for their parts in an attack on an 18-year-old north Belfast man in February, 1998.
The Belfast Crown Court judge said the attack on Mr Patrick Griffin was "persistent and quite deliberate". During it, police threatened to have him shot by the LVF.
The judge added: "In my opinion, this breakdown in discipline calls for the most careful consideration by the police authorities to consider ways of ensuring that the same conduct will never be repeated.
"That is the minimum response which the public are entitled to expect." One of the officers, Darren James Neill (31), a father of three who has already resigned as a reservist, was jailed for two years for attacking Mr Griffin in the back of his Landrover and threatening to have him shot following his arrest in Flax Street on February 2nd, 1998.
Neill, whose address was given as c/o Oldpark RUC station, was given a concurrent 12 months for perverting the course of justice to cover up his attack. The judge said this was "designed to exculpate him from the circumstances of his behaviour".
Jailed with him for a year was RUC constable Michael Magowan (32), also of Oldpark RUC station, who had been the driver of the Landrover. He admitted taking part in the coverup, which the judge accepted had been carried out because of a sense "of misplaced loyalty to his colleagues". Magowan, currently suspended, is expected to be dismissed from the force.
The RUC reservist who blew the whistle on the attack and cover-up, Andrew Timothy Lea (39), a former soldier, walked free after being fined £1,000 for his part in the cover-up.
The judge said "had it not been for his actions, Mr Griffin might have ended up in the dock instead of being recognised as the injured party".
The judge said that Lea, currently suspended, could not live with what had been done and told his authorities.
Matthew Shane Butcher (24), of the 2nd Battalion Light Infantry, Palace Barracks, who at one stage had been prepared to give evidence for the prosecution, was also freed on a £1,000 fine for his part in the cover-up.
The judge said he had no doubt Butcher's decision to give evidence "had a profound impact on both Magowan and Neill and contributed to their decisions to plead guilty".
The court heard that after Mr Griffin was put in the back of the police Landrover, Neill, in the front seat, turned to him and shouted sectarian abuse at him. He punched him in the face and attacked him with his baton, threatening to drive to the Shankill Road where he would be dumped for the LVF to shoot.
The judge said this treatment "meted out to him was bad enough, but what followed thereafter was even worse', in that they tried to frame Mr Griffin for assaulting police.
The judge said this was a "shameful episode". Mr Justice McLaughlin said Mr Griffin had been "vulnerable and in an environment which was a hostile one for him.
"It was accompanied by, and exacerbated by, deeply repulsive sectarian behaviour which is more often associated with hooligans and has no place in a civilised society".
He added that the threat to have Mr Griffin shot by the LVF "constituted a gross abuse of his human rights and was both shameful and shocking".
The judge said although Neill was the only one guilty of assault, all had been present and "one would have expected that the first instincts of properly motivated officers would have been to intervene at once".
Mr Griffin said he was "happy enough" with the sentences, although at one stage he thought the officers would never be prosecuted.