A drugged-up woman who snatched a young child from his mother at the Royal Albert Hall while high on the chemsex drug GHB has been spared prison.
The mother was attending a children's concert at the iconic London music venue with her four-year-old boy when he was suddenly carried away by Charlotte Robbins.
She only caught up with the 28-year-old after spotting her son's distinctive red shoelaces disappearing into the crowd on March 10 last year.
Responding to the mother's cries for help, a man from the crowd grabbed the boy from Robbins and returned him her.
"If I hadn't seen his legs I wouldn't have been able to see him," she said during the trial.
"He was struggling as well, he's four, he was held pretty tightly. He was calling for me, struggling to break loose.
"People were walking past, they didn't know what was going on. I said: 'Help she's got my child, help'.
"I don't know who it was, he just pulled my son from her and gave him to me..'
Robbins told an officer at the time that she had taken GHB and seemed visibly high to the officer and to a member of the venue's staff.
She claimed she had made an honest mistake and thought she was returning the child to his legal guardian.
Dominic Hockley, prosecuting, earlier told Southwark Crown Court: "She accepts that she took the boy who at that stage was a four-year-old child.
"That she took from the lawful control of his mother. That isn't in dispute.
"We say that her actions weren't reasonable, she made no effort at all, at all, to establish the facts before grabbing the child from his mother."
Mr Hockley added: "No child, you may think, should be dragged from his mother by a stranger.
"Irrespective of whether she believed he might be, she should not be taking children unsupervised.
"That's more so in the way in which she did what she did. The prosecution say there were plainly or other reasonable things to do.
"There were teachers around, security around, the boy's legal guardian. Why did she think that she had to become the physical enforcer of a care order?
"Even if she was right in what she says was her honest, genuine mistake, what she did was not reasonable in these circumstances."
Robbins was high on GHB and may have also smoked crystal meth the night before the concert on March 10 last year.
"Her mistake was not reasonable because we say it came about because of her intoxication,' Mr Hockley said.
"Where a mistake results from voluntary intoxication by alcohol or drugs such a mistake cannot be thought of as reasonable.
"There is ample evidence that the defendant was intoxicated."
Robbins, who has waited to be sentenced since April, attended court with dried blood on her hands and sobbed in the dock.
Judge Jeffrey Pegden QC sentenced her to an 18-month community order with a 30-day rehabilitation activity requirement.
"That means the probation service will assist you with your various difficulties,"he said.
Robbins, of Belsize Park, north London, denied the charge, but was convicted of taking a child from a person having lawful control.
