Defence barrister Jessica Flain said West had partly paid a man to restore the map, but he would not hand it back until the full fee was settled. She asked for sentencing to be adjourned for seven days so a friend could pay the balance and West could take the map to Charing Cross Police Station.
Judge Charlotte Welsh refused, saying she did “not believe a word of it”.
She said West had told the court in June that he could return the map within seven days, and in August that it was with a friend and he would retrieve it once he had recovered from heart surgery.
“Again, that appears to have been a lie,” she said. “You were charged in February. You have had eight months to return the map.”
The judge said she believed West had a buyer in mind and had stolen the map “to order”.
The court heard he had 27 convictions for 107 offences in the UK and abroad, mostly for dishonesty and including 41 thefts. They included a burglary conviction in Hungary in 2011 and a theft conviction in France in 2013, and he had also been convicted under various identities.
Flain said West, a father of two, was “ashamed and embarrassed” and had been in debt and unable to meet basic living costs. She described the offence as “a short-term, pressured decision by an elderly man living in difficult circumstances”.
Judge Welsh said the map was of “international cultural significance” and the damage had “permanently diminished what can be learned from it”. The court was told the two digital copies of the atlas are incomplete.
West was jailed for three years for criminal damage, with concurrent sentences of 16 months for theft and six months for possessing a bladed article. The judge refused to suspend the sentence, saying immediate custody was needed “to deter other people from doing precisely what you have”.
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