'If he hadn’t been released early, this would never have happened': Woman’s anger after violent attacker’s early prison release
Emily, who is 21, was left with serious head and face injuries when she was attacked by a man with a screw in Sheffield.
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The victim of a serious attack on a night out has told LBC of her “anger” that the perpetrator had been released from prison early.
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Emily, who is 21, was left with serious head and face injuries when she was attacked by a man with a screw in Sheffield in April this year.
Her attacker had carried out a similar crime in Nottingham just 11 months earlier.
She told LBC: “I was two minutes from home and someone had essentially followed me and started to attack me, quite badly.
“I just remember waking up in my room the next morning with paramedics in my room, the police and my parents. I thought ‘what is going on?'"
“I start to feel my face, and it hurts.”
Emily had accidentally pocket dialled her mum earlier in the night.
When she woke early that morning and returned her daughter’s call, the attack had just happened, and the suspect answered the phone.
“Someone heard from one of the flats above the shops and came down. The attacker was seen pulling up his trousers and luckily forensics came back that nothing did happen, whether that was because he was interrupted or not, I dread to think.
“He took my phone and answered when my mum rang, saying he was trying to help me and had a five-minute conversation with her, after he’d attacked me.”
Her attacker, Matthew Ward, had been jailed 11 months previously for a similar attack in Nottingham.
In February 2025, he’d followed a woman walking alone, hit her over the head and tried to suffocate her. Ward was given a 22-month sentence in a young offender’s institution for assault occasioning actual bodily harm and intentional suffocation.
But less than a year later, he was out and on the streets of Sheffield attacking Emily. “I’m angry," she explains.
"If he wasn’t released from prison early, this would never have happened.
“This still affects me every day of my life. I don’t exactly know the process of it, but I know if this was looked at properly, repeat offenders wouldn’t be coming out.
“I’ve got three permanent scars on my face and on my leg, quite visible. I had cuts on my wrists as well."
Ward was arrested the day after his attack on Emily, prowling the streets of Sheffield in an area near to where he’d followed her home.
He was jailed for 30 months for assault occasioning actual bodily harm and given a 10-year restraining order.
But for Emily, it doesn’t mean the end of it for her.
“I’m scared of getting that phone call to say he’s coming back out.
“I don't think anything will happen to me, because I’m not in Sheffield now and I don't think it was anything personal. He didn’t even know my name.
“He’s just a horrible person. He’s done it in Nottingham; he’s done it in Sheffield. People need to be aware there are people like him.
“Who’s deemed him as safe to be let out in the first place?”
In September 2024, the Labour government made changes to the Standard Determinate Release Scheme, meaning prisoners only had to serve 40% of their sentence as opposed to 50%, in a bid to reduce prison overcrowding.
Almost 70,000 prisoners have been released in that time according to figures from the Ministry of Justice.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice said: “We have been clear that we wanted to go further and block more offenders from getting out sooner into their sentence but could not do so without risking prisons reaching capacity and collapsing.
"If that happened, police could not make arrests, courts could not remand offenders and there would be unchecked criminality on our streets.
"We are pulling every lever to protect the public and cut crime – undergoing the largest prison building programme since the Victorian era, launching the biggest ever expansion of tagging to toughen community punishment and increasing support to victims, giving them a say in the strict licence conditions of offenders."