A woman with a habit of sniffing five cans of lighter fuel a day held a screwdriver to the neck of a taxi driver and tried to rob him of his takings.

Mohammed Hafeez Khan picked up Joanna Mahoney in Marlborough Road, Manningham, after she rang for a cab in the early hours of the morning, a Bradford Crown Court judge was told.

But soon after he set off towards the city centre the 36-year-old, who was sat in the back seat, produced a screwdriver and held it to his neck.

Mahoney was yesterday jailed for 32 months after she admitted a charge of attempted robbery. Prosecutor Louise Azmi told the court yesterday that Mr Khan felt something cold against his neck and initially thought it was a knife.

Mahoney, of Salt Street, Manningham, demanded money from the driver, but he was able to dial 999 on his mobile phone and alert the police.

Mrs Azmi said Mahoney tried to get out of Khan’s cab, which was still moving. Although he didn’t want her to get out, he eventually stopped the car because the situation was getting dangerous.

Mahoney walked off, but police officers arrived on the scene and Mr Khan helped them to find her in the nearby Lumb Lane area.

Judge Roger Scott was told Mahoney, had a previous conviction for an assault in 1999 and had been given a caution in 2005 for hitting someone over the head with a bottle.

The court heard that, although she admitted committing the latest offence in February this year, she pleaded guilty on the basis that another woman had put her up to it and she was scared of her.

Lawyer Anne-Marie Hutton, for Mahoney, revealed that her client had been abusing lighter fuel for 11 years and even though she had reduced her intake she was still using about five cans a day.

“This is a lady who has eventually come clean about what she says happened on that night,” said Miss Hutton. “It was a case were she had pressure applied to her and the screwdriver was passed to her. Fortunately for all parties involved it was a relatively short-lived incident.”

Miss Hutton urged Judge Scott to consider suspending any prison sentence, but he noted that there had been recent media coverage about taxi drivers complaining that sentences were too lenient and not protecting them.

Judge Scott told Mahoney that she would have received a sentence of five years in jail if there had been a trial, but he was reducing the term to take account of the basis of her guilty plea to the offence.

“Therefore in this case you will receive what many may think is a lenient sentence. Probably the taxi drivers think it is a lenient sentence,” said Judge Scott. “They should blame not me but the guidelines council on sentencing for that.”