What happened
In May 2005 Joanne Piednoir, 44, was in the VIP section of the Liquid nightclub in Windsor. She had argued with another woman about a shortage of toilet paper. Door staff said she had become “quite angry and animated” and was using “colourful language”. Her friends denied both.
She was being ejected when Blue Kinane, a door supervisor from Slough, put her in a headlock. The court described it as the nelson headlock, with both arms under hers and the hands locked behind her head. Her neck was broken. She suffered serious spinal injuries, spent months in hospital and can walk only short distances. She weighed under 50kg. He weighed 101kg.
The outcome
Kinane was found guilty of causing actual bodily harm at the end of April 2006 at Reading Crown Court. On 2 June 2006, according to the Guardian, Judge Gordon Risius gave him a suspended 12-month sentence, 150 hours of community service and £2,000 compensation. The paper reported that he “escaped jail”.
The judge told him: “You didn’t intend or forsee the injury you inflicted.” He said Kinane did not present a significant risk to the public, while calling it a serious offence and saying the victim faced a bleak future.
What went wrong
The court heard that Kinane had used the nelson headlock thousands of times, and that it had twice left people unconscious. It is not used by UK police forces, which regard it as inherently dangerous.
That is the finding. The hold was in routine use by a man who had applied it repeatedly without consequence, in an industry where nobody stopped him. The injury was not intended, and the judge accepted that. A neck hold does not need intent to break a neck.
Size is not the mechanism, but it is part of the picture: a man of 101kg applying a neck hold to a woman of under 50kg.
What it teaches
A headlock used to move a customer is a neck-injury mechanism. Any hold that takes the head and neck carries spinal risk, whatever the intent behind it, and the fact that it has worked a thousand times is not evidence that it is safe.
Ejection is a task with an end point: the person has to leave. There are ways to do that which do not take the neck, and a venue that permits one which does has decided where the risk sits.
The other lesson is about who stops a technique. The hold was Kinane’s normal practice, so the people who worked alongside him had seen it, and the systems that should have noticed had not.
Questions for the room
- The hold was deemed inherently dangerous by UK police forces. What made it acceptable on a nightclub door?
- You are ejecting a woman who is arguing with another customer. Where do your hands go when she plants her feet?
- He had used the hold thousands of times. What in a venue’s practice would have stopped him before this night?
Evidence and limits
Confidence: probable. A single press source was opened for this page, The Guardian’s report of 3 June 2006. Two further outlets that reported the case were not opened for this pass, so the two-source rule is not met, and the detail here rests on that one report.
The sentencing date is established by the report’s statement that he escaped jail “yesterday”, which places it on 2 June 2006. The conviction came at the end of April; no source gives the exact day, so none is stated.
Kinane is named because he was convicted by a criminal court, which is the only basis on which this page names anyone. No other individual is named.
Our vulnerable and volatile persons training covers ejection and restraint decisions made in public, at speed, by staff with no clinical training.
Sources
Reviewed 20 October 2026.