A Manchester teacher jailed for firing an air pistol during a confrontation with a gang of youths she claimed had vandalised her home was freed by the Court of Appeal today after serving five weeks of a six-month sentence.

Special needs teacher Linda Walker, 48, fired at the pavement during a stand-off with a group she described as a gang of "yobs" outside her home in Urmston, Greater Manchester, last August.

Three appeal judges set aside her six-month prison sentence and granted her a conditional discharge. But the judges refused her permission to challenge her convictions for affray and possessing a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence.

Mrs Walker sat in the dock and smiled at her family at the back of the courtroom as Lord Justice Rose, Mr Justice Gibbs and Mr Justice Stanley Burnton announced their decision.

She had told police she had received nuisance phone calls abusing her family, her garden shed had been broken into, and a car and her garden had been vandalised. But no evidence was produced at the trial that any of the youths she confronted was involved in the vandalism.

Mrs Walker was jailed at Manchester Crown Court on March 29 and was later refused bail pending appeal. Her sentence proved highly controversial and supporters collected more than 9,000 signatures on a petition demanding her release.

In her bid to challenge her conviction, she sought leave to call fresh evidence from a milkman, David Matthews, that one of the youths had been seen on her property. But the judges said the evidence did not relate to what happened on the day of the confrontation.

Lord Justice Rose, giving his ruling, said the use and discharge of firearms in a public place is "a cause of great public concern".

"There can be no excuse whatever for what you did that night," he told Mrs Walker. He said her actions in firing the airgun at least twice, having earlier tested the gun to make sure it was working, could have attracted "a custodial sentence of considerable length".

"If the courts were generally to respond to such conduct in any other way it would be a recipe for both anarchy and injury of the innocent."

But he said the courts were sometimes called on to conduct a "delicate exercise of an often difficult discretion" over non-custodial sentences.

He said Mrs Walker was of previous good character, not only because she had no previous convictions but also because as a teacher for 25 years she had made a "valuable and important contribution" to the community.

Lord Justice Rose went on: "Old and recent history teaches us that those who take the law into their own hands are often unreliable when seeking to identify those whom they believe are properly the subject of their wrath."

He said the had had to take into account Walker’s "fragile mental state" brought about by pressure of work - for three years she had been teaching emotionally disturbed children with behavioural problems and her school had been placed under special measures.

He said that taking everything into account, it would have been open to the trial judge to take the "very exceptional course" of imposing a non-custodial sentence.

No public interest would be served by her "continued incarceration", he said.

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