At the High Court in Edinburgh today (7 January 2020) Lord Arthurson sentenced Lewis Reid to 6 years and 6 months imprisonment and he was disqualified from driving for 9 years after the offender pled guilty to 22 charges involving offences including reset, dangerous driving and the supply of a Class A controlled drug.
On sentencing, Lord Arthurson made the following statement in court:
“Lewis Reid, on 11 November 2019 at Kilmarnock Sheriff Court you tendered pleas of guilty to 22 charges on a 48 charge indictment. These offences were committed between August 2018 and July 2019 and in respect of each you were at the time the subject of between one and five bail orders. You have accrued a relatively short but recent criminal record, all at summary level. The author of the background report prepared in the present case has formed the view that you have minimised your responsibility in respect of at least some of your offending. You have a history of polydrug misuse. A lengthy narrative was made available to the sheriff before whom you appeared in Kilmarnock. I will not be rehearsing that material today.
Your counsel has advanced clear and helpful submissions this morning in mitigation, and I propose to take all of the points made on your behalf into account in imposing sentence upon you. In particular I note your age now and at the time of the index offending, your personal and family background, your employment history and your desire, expressed through your counsel, to be rehabilitated through offence-focussed programmes and the support of your family.
Let me be very clear with you as I turn now to disposal. First, on any view there is no possible alternative in your case to a substantial custodial sentence; second, in my opinion the sheriff at Kilmarnock was well justified in remitting this indictment to this Court; and, third, notwithstanding the terms of the background report to which reference has already been made, I consider that you present a high risk of reoffending and of causing serious harm to the public at large, as is apparent from the nature and scale of your offending in this case, particularly in respect of (i) your involvement in the supply of class A controlled drugs, and (ii) an appalling catalogue of dangerous driving by you.
I now sentence you on this indictment as follows. In respect of the offences of reset, as these appear in charges 5, 14, 28 and 39, you will serve, on an in cumulo basis, a period of 15 months imprisonment, discounted from a period of 20 months due to the timing of your guilty pleas.
Concurrently with that period you will serve in respect of your offending under the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995, as set out in charges 10, 19, 20, 24, 25, 31 and 48, a period of 9 months imprisonment, again on an in cumulo basis, discounted from a period of 12 months.
Consecutive to these periods you will serve in respect of the dangerous driving offences set out in charges 1, 11, 26, 33 and 37 a period of 27 months imprisonment, again on an in cumulo basis, discounted from a period of 36 months. Your licence will be duly endorsed and you will additionally be disqualified from driving for a period of 9 years from today’s date, that period being discounted from one of 12 years. You will further require to sit and pass an extended test of competency at the end of that period prior to obtaining any future licence.
Consecutive to the last mentioned period of imprisonment, you will serve, in respect of each of charges 32 and 46, being the gravest charges before the Court today and involving the supply by you of the class A controlled drug known as Ecstasy, it being in respect of charge 32 a matter of agreed fact in the narrative before the Court that one of the females who took the drug supplied by you died as a result of taking it, albeit that your act of supply was not to her but to another individual, concurrent periods of 3 years imprisonment, discounted from periods of 4 years. I should add that in respect of all of these discounted periods I have elected to apportion nominally a single period of 3 months to the various bail aggravations libelled.
Finally, you will be admonished on charges 45 and 47 and you will be admonished and your licence will be endorsed on charges 4 and 13.
You will accordingly serve a total period of 6 years and 6 months imprisonment, backdated to 18 July 2019, being the date of your most recent remand in custody in respect of these matters. You have been the subject of various earlier short remand periods and I confirm that I have duly taken these into account in today’s sentencing exercise. I further confirm that in the course of this exercise I have had in mind throughout the important sentencing principle of totality.”
