Support continues to grow for a Billingham man jailed for attacking his abusive father.
More than 34,000 people from across the world have signed an e-petition calling for Benjamin Wilson to be freed from prison.
Wilson was jailed for six years for beating his dad Craig with a hammer.
The 46-year-old was left with brain damage and holes in his head.
A court heard this week that Wilson was defending his mother when he went into his father’s bedroom in the Blackett Avenue home and beat him with the lump hammer.
Wilson, a new dad himself, had grown up in an atmosphere of violence, fear and intimidation” and had seen “excessive and extreme violence and threats of violence” by his father, and was subjected to violence himself.
His jail sentence has sparked a global public outrage with an online petition titled “Free Ben Wilson” gaining 34,000 signatures in just two days.
A Facebook page titled Help Free Ben Wilson has 13,000 followers.
One person who signed the petition wrote: “I’ve been through domestic abuse and violence and have seen the affect it has had on my eight-year-old son. He was protecting his mother. Maybe a suspended sentence would have been more appropriate.”
A supporter from Australia said: “No one who protects another human being from a threat should be punished.”
A woman from Belfast said: “I’m signing because it’s a disgrace this man has gone to prison for protecting his Mother. Who knows what could of happened to her had he not intervened.”
Hundreds of comments have been posted on the Gazette Facebook page.
One Teesside woman said: “He should not have gone to prison he had already had a sentence the life he’d had.”
Another man said: “Get this lad out of jail sounds like he’s suffered enough.”
Wilson, of Waldridge Grove, Billingham, was jailed on Tuesday after admitting wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm.
Teesside’s top judge, Simon Bourne Arton QC, gave Wilson the lowest sentence he could after deciding the severity of the offence under the sentencing guidelines.
During the court hearing on Tuesday, Judge Simon Bourne-Arton QC said the case was a sustained attack with a “fearsome weapon” on a defenceless man.
But he said the alcoholic father, described in court as a “violent nasty drunk”, had subjected his family to domestic abuse, and the son had been the victim of such abuse and violence.
The attack happened on May 31 last year. Mr Wilson Snr drank heavily and was being verbally abusive and making threats at a family party at the parents’ Norton home.
When the son heard crashing, shouting and commotion from the bedroom, he armed himself with a heavy lump hammer from his tool bag.
He hit his father at least five times to the head and face with the weapon then left the house.
Mr Wilson Snr, 46, was described in court as a “Jekyll and Hyde”, who once served a two-year sentence for assaulting his wife.
During that assault on New Year’s Eve 2007, Wilson Snr put both hands around his wife’s neck and pressed so hard her eyes bled and she passed out.
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