Tom McKellar, a gamekeeper/farmer at Auch Estate in Argyll who was convicted last month of possession of the banned pesticide Carbofuran (see here and here) was due to be sentenced today. Sentencing has now been deferred until 23 July (we don’t yet know the reason for this further delay).
The Carbofuran was discovered at McKellar’s place nearly three years ago in June 2009 during a police raid in connection with the discovery of a poisoned golden eagle at Glen Orchy on 7 June 2009 (see here). Toxicology results showed the dead eagle had been poisoned with Carbofuran. McKellar reportedly admitted during a police interview that he had previously laid out poison baits to kill foxes (see here) but he wasn’t charged with poisoning that golden eagle.
Also discovered during that police raid was a stash of illegal handguns in McKellar’s loft. On conviction at the High Court in Glasgow in December 2010, instead of receiving the mandatory five-year prison term he was given a sentence of 300 hours’ community service (see here).
There is a lot more to the Glen Orchy eagle-poisoning incident than meets the eye but we’re unable to disclose further information until McKellar has been sentenced. Rest assured, we’ll be writing more about this in due course.
Raptor Persecution UK 
There seems to be a bit of a pattern within these type of hearings! Sentencing deferred, hearings postponed etc. From a pure management viewpoint, this must be costing a fortune, or is that too simplistic a verdict? Is there no sense of urgency to complete the case load under consideration or consider matters on the “value for money” principle? I’m all for true justice but sometimes things seem to be a bit un-necessarily elongated. Is it me or am I having a bad afternoon as a consequence of proposed Buzzard controls?
No, it’s not just you John. Talk about ‘ground-hog day’!!! If it wasn’t so serious these ongoing saga’s would be laughable and if you put it into a book nobody would believe it wasn’t way-out fiction. One wonders just how far the anti-bird of prey ring stretches – pretty wide and high-up I would hazard to guess. They make the Mafia look like primary school kids – but we’ll beat them in the end if we stick to our guns; and perhaps more importantly, stick together in the fight.!
By the time he’s sentenced it’ll be over three years since they found Carbofuran inside a gamebag on his front porch!
Delayed proceedings in this case will be one of several issues we want to talk about, once his case has ended.
I tend to the view that there is a concerted effort to make these cases so expensive to prosecute in order to deter the Fiscal from doing so. Every delay/deferral adds to the cost.
Just wondering if this type of case ever gets time barred, and if so, could this be what some Lawyers are trying to engineer by these repeated delays. Delays that will of course also add to the overall cost. Maybe somebody out there with good legal knowledge could let us know.
Hopefully someoneknowledgeable will comment. I think that can happen.
It is not uncommon for these types of cases to go time barred. There have been several high profile ones over the years and the most recent one (that we’re aware of) happened just in the past few months.
Whether this is a deliberate ploy or a result of incompetence is open to question and will probably not be answered without a judicial review because COPFS do not have to publicly account for their legal decisions.
However, these delays are not restricted to wildlife crime cases. This report (from 2001) showed that delays were common for summary offences at four courts where records were analysed: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/Doc/156615/0042074.pdf