Barefoot bandit jailed for crime spree

A youthful thief who rocketed to international notoriety as the “Barefoot Bandit” while he evaded police during a two-year crime spree has been sentenced to more than seven years in state prison after pleading guilty to dozens of charges.

Colton Harris-Moore, 20, showed no reaction as the sentence was delivered by a judge who took pity over his bleak upbringing at the hands of an alcoholic mother and a series of her convict boyfriends – a situation she described as a “mind-numbing absence of hope”.