[NorthernLight]

There's a lack of balanced information about this case generally, but the one thing I have noticed in hearing what the student thinks about it all is that he comes across as not taking any responsibility for what he did. Apparently all he did was "go into a friend's new chill out pad" not realising it was someone else's house and was arrested "a few minutes later" apparently having done nothing else. He "fell in with the wrong crowd" which was "inevitable" given the area in which he grew up and only pleaded guilty to the crime to avoid subjecting his mother to the "shame" of a more drawn out trial.

In other words - it was all out of my control, I didn't do anything wrong really.

If that's what he said at the Fitness to Practice interveiw at Imperial where they reviewed his offer and subsequently decided to withdraw it, then it seems to me the nature of exactly what he did and how bad it was would have been a secondary consideration for them - they surely just thought "all we're hearing is excuses and evasion" and decided that perhaps he hadn't learned the right lesson from this experience . . .

And yes, the media overkill about it won't be helping either.