The case against Andrew Malcom Slaughter, gamekeeper on the Inverinate Estate, Lochalsh, will continue at Inverness Sheriff Court on 12 October 2011 for a debate. This is an intermediate step in procedure when legal points are considered.
Slaughter is charged with offences under the Wildlife & Countryside Act 1981 and the Agriculture (Scotland) Act 1948. Background info on this case can be found in blog posts on 23 March 2011, 8 April 2011 and 28 April 2011.
Raptor Persecution UK 
You must be having a laugh, adjourned until October, WHAT !!!
Who are these people who are supposed to be running our so-called justice system??? I despair, it’s hardly worth the effort of taking criminals to court in the first place when they can make such a mockery. If this was just one isolated case it would be bad enough, but it’s happening with nearly every wildlife offence case that comes to court, when are our sheriffs and judges going to do the right thing and uphold the wildlife protection laws that have been around long enough for them to have learned them off by heart.
Now if I was poaching Pheasants or Deer etc, and I was caught at it, I would have the full weight of the law thrown against me, I would have firearms certificate/licence, my guns, nets, traps and even my car confiscated. I would receive at the very least a hefty fine for the most meagre offence and would most likely receive a jail sentence also, oh, and of course I would have a criminal record for the rest of my life !!!
I suppose I could plead mitigating circumstances as I was only trying to reduce the non indiginous game population in order to give the indiginous Raptors a better chance. The thing is if there weren’t all these semi tame introduced game birds then the estate owners wouldn’t bother with the Raptors.
nirofo.
Many of these raptor persecution cases seem to be plagued by never ending delays and deferrals.
Why is this?
Is it becoming a ploy to make prosecution of such cases prohibitively expensive.
It seems that adjournments of summary criminal cases in the Sheriff courts are nothing new and are not just restricted to wildlife crime cases. A report published in 2001 by researchers at Aberdeen University School of Law shows the extent of the problem. Check out the Appendices which give national statistics on adjournments throughout Scotland during the late 1990s: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/Doc/156615/0042074.pdf
It doesn’t make it any less frustrating but perhaps puts things in perspective.