The Law Killers by Alexander McGregor Read Free Book Online Page B

before midnight. Since Smith lived so close to the semidetached house in the Lochee housing estate, he was in a position to be aware of movements at his neighbour’s home.
    In light of his early admissions, there was no need for a trial. Two months after his crimes, Smith appeared in the dock at the High Court in Edinburgh and again confessed to what he had done.
    Sentencing him, Lord Wheatley looked at Smith with unconcealed distaste and told him:
In view of what has been said, there is nothing I can say to you, save this: These two atrocious crimes were carried out within a home and people, particularly women, are entitled to expect that in their home they are safe from attacks such as you perpetrated. If women cannot be safe in their own home, then society has reached a sorry state. Therefore, in order to mark the court’s great displeasure and anxiety at such offences and to deter others, I propose to fashion my sentences accordingly.
    His Lordship said the law prescribed but one penalty for murder – life imprisonment. As far as the rape was concerned, he would impose a separate sentence of seven years’ imprisonment, explaining that this would place it on Smith’s record, to be taken into account when his possible release was being considered.
    Referring again to the life sentence, Lord Wheatley added that he would make a recommendation – something he seldom did – that Smith should serve a period of at least 12 years. He ordered that the two sentences should run concurrently, meaning that the seven years for the rape would be served at the same time as the sentence for murder.
    Compared with present-day sentencing protocols, when judges are obliged to suggest a minimum tariff, 12 years might seem a relatively lenient disposal, particularly in the circumstances of a brutal and unprovoked murder followed by the repeated rape of a second victim. But it was not particularly exceptional at the time and brought no public outcry.
    However, Lord Wheatley, then Scotland’s most senior judge, might have felt differently had he had known how John Cant Smith was to behave in the future. He was not to know, either, that 12 years was nowhere near to the time the murdering rapist would actually spend behind bars.
    A little over three years after descending the steps in the dock of the High Court to vanish out of public view and into the penal system, Smith once again burst into prominence. But this time it was not a helpless young woman who was to become his hostage but a prison officer.
    Along with two other lifers held with him at Peterhead Prison, Smith took part in a riot in an attempt to air alleged grievances. The trio petrol-bombed a section of the jail’s A Hall and seized one of their guards before embarking on an orgy of destruction. By the end of the five-day stand-off they had caused £260,000 of damage and made national headlines before surrendering.
    His fellow rioters were every bit as dangerous as himself. One was William Ballantyne, a 27-year-old jailed shortly before Smith for stabbing a man to death in a Glasgow street brawl. The other was one of Scotland’s most notorious criminals – 32-year-old Andrew Walker, a former Army corporal who had machine-gunned three soldiers to death in a £19,000 military payroll robbery 18 months earlier, for which he was given a 30-year sentence.
    To justify his actions, Smith made an eloquent plea during his trial at the High Court at Peterhead, claiming that he had ‘taken desperate measures because of his desperate situation.’
    His written plea in mitigation of his actions read:
Can anyone ever understand the horrors of prison life, even by visiting prison? No one can understand this without being part of it, feeling the anxieties, knowing the helplessness, living in desolation.
Prison life does not provide the creative correction and training needed for a man to be able to make a new beginning on the outside. Instead, it is geared to use the men as labour, punish