Evil Spirts - a get out of Jail free card.

The Daily Mangle has a reputation for spinning stories to read so that they are totally unrepresentative of the facts but if this story is true then I am mystified about the way our justice system works;

A woman was convicted of unlawful wounding when she dressed in dark clothes, gloves and a home-made balaclava and attacked her mother, repeatedly stabbing her with a kitchen knife inflicting serious face and arm injuries.

Surprisingly even after going all Michael Myers psychiatrists ruled the culprit has no mental illness, even though she claimed she was acting on the instructions of evil spirits. She must still be considered a danger to society since a psychiatrist who assessed her said she was still a risk because she believed the spirits could possess her again and she has no control over them.

So what sentence did the judge give this violently dangerous criminal?

He he accepted the defendant had strong beliefs in witchcraft and thought she was possessed by the spirit of her dead grandmother at the time of the attack and sentenced her to just a 12-month suspended prison sentence and was ordered to do 120 hours of unpaid work!

This didn't happen in some African country where even belief in witchcraft by the authorities is commonplace, but in Leicester England.

How can someone's supernatural beliefs be a mitigating reason for sentencing a potentially dangerous person?

Surely if such beliefs are still held and can be used to justify violence they should increase any sentence, perhaps indefinitely.