A MAN who stabbed two friends after a drinking binge was jailed for four years at Teesside Crown Court yesterday.

Jason Richards, 38, had little recollection of stabbing the men in the chest at the house in Moorcock Close, Bankfields, Eston, said Jamie Hill, mitigating.

He said that Richards was a newcomer to the "twilight world" of all-day and every day drinking after a breakup with his previous girlfriend.

Richards was then the victim of two serious assaults, which left him with a fractured skull and a broken arm, and he was unable to work.

He was evicted from his home and he and his girlfriend moved in with Stephen Sheerin.

Martina Connolly, prosecuting, said that Mr Sheerin was asleep on a living room sofa at 2am on August 5 when Richards walked in from the kitchen. Richards stabbed another friend, David Pearson, who was sitting drinking nearby.

He pulled the knife out and then stabbed Mr Sheerin in the left side of the chest before walking back into the kitchen.

The two injured men staggered outside where Mr Sheerin drove them to the James Cook University Hospital, in Middlesbrough.

Mr Pearson was detained there for four days, and Mr Sheerin was discharged the next day.

Police went to the house at 4.20am but there was nobody there.

They searched the grassy bank nearby where they found Richards and his girlfriend sleeping under a duvet.

Mr Hill said that the stabbings occurred after days of binge drinking by all four, and Richards became paranoid about Mr Pearson's behaviour towards his girlfriend.

The Recorder of Middlesbrough, Judge Peter Fox QC, told Richards that there could not be a lenient sentence.

He said: "You can pull your life together and when you come out of prison you can turn yourself away from this sort of dissolute existence which led up to this occasion."

Richards, of Coulby Manor Farm, Middlesbrough, pleaded guilty to wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm and unlawful wounding.