Court / Court round-up 25 September
A CUNNINGSBURGH teenager has been placed under supervision after admitting to spitting at police officers.
Dougray Bain, 18, previously admitted to spitting on two constables at Trench bar on 31 March.
He also admitted to failing to leave when told to do so by police, struggling violently with officers and repeatedly spitting within and kicking the interior of a police vehicle.
Officers had to use a spit hood to control Bain during the incident.
Sentencing had been deferred for the preparation of background reports, and defence agent Tommy Allan said the report was “overwhelmingly positive”.
He said Bain had shown “a significant amount of shame and remorse”.
Sheriff Ian Cruickshank said he hoped that was “heartfelt remorse”.
The sheriff said assaults on police were “not a Shetland problem”, but a “matter facing the whole of Scotland”.
He placed Bain under supervision for 12 months and ordered him to pay £600 to a restitution fund.
A FIRST-TIME offending driver who left a cyclist with serious injuries after an accident has been banned from the road.
Defence agent Tommy Allan criticised a rule which meant Ann-Marie Irvine, who expressed serious remorse over the accident, had to automatically be disqualified.
The 55 year old, from Tingwall, hit the cyclist at the Veensgarth roundabout below Herrislea hotel at around 9am on 18 June this year.
Procurator fiscal Duncan Mackenzie said Irvine “simply failed to notice” the cyclist, who she rushed to help in the aftermath.
He was left with four broken vertebrae and a broken left fibula, as well as cuts and abrasions.
Irvine admitted driving without due care or attention and causing serious injury.
Allan said the law, which automatically resulted in a 12 month ban, did not take in to account the level of culpability Irvine had shown.
Irvine had even seen the cyclist asking for a wheelchair following the accident and offered him one she had access to, Allan said.
The year ban “seems to me to be particularly harsh,” he added.
Sheriff Ian Cruickshank said there was nothing he could do to prevent that, adding: “There’s no means by which that can be avoided.”
He admonished Irvine, but she was banned from driving for 12 months due to her guilty plea for causing serious injury by driving without due care or attention.
POLICE found a drunk 32 year old man repeatedly kicking his girlfriend’s door when they arrived to a call last month.
Thomas Currie, from Walls, admitting behaving in a threatening or abusive manner, forcing his way into his partner’s home, refusing to leave and shouting and banging on the outside door.
Currie had gone out drinking on 11 August, and had been told by his partner he was not welcome at hers afterwards.
But he turned up at around 1.30am, barging his way past her into the house in Lerwick’s Rechabite Place.
She told him she would call the police, and despite Currie grabbing hold of her when she was on the phone she escaped his grip.
Currie set off on foot, but soon after returned.
When he did, police could hear him shouting and kicking her door while demanding his car keys.
Lerwick Sheriff Court heard the relationship was still ongoing, and that they both wanted it to continue.
Sheriff Ian Cruickshank deferred sentence for Currie to be of good behaviour for six months.
He told him he would be released on bail in the meantime, and that if he committed any offences while out on bail it would make the sentence “immensely more serious”.
AN ASPIRING gardener who was caught with three juvenile cannabis plants has been urged to “stick to the cultivation of pansies”.
Jason Pottinger was also found to have a number of cannabis seedlings when police searched his Aith address on 29 April this year.
Thirty seven year old Pottinger admitted producing a class B drug at his home address at Lerwick Sheriff Court on Wednesday.
Sheriff Ian Cruickshank said this was “clearly not the first time” Pottinger had been before the court, particularly on drug charges.
He ordered the forfeiture of the plants and seeds, on the Crown’s motion, and ordered Pottinger to carry out 65 hours of unpaid work in the next three months.
The sheriff told Pottinger: “In the future, if you have aspirations to be a gardener, stick to the cultivation of pansies and such like.”
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