Neil Strachan who was part of a paedophile gang in Edinburgh has had his minimum sentence almost halved by appeal judges. Neil Strachan, now 56, was serving a life sentence for planning and carrying out horrific abuse of children.
Neil Strachan, who was convicted in 2009 of the crimes, was originally to serve a minimum of 16 years in jail before he could bid for freedom. But his minimum sentence has been cut to nine years.
Neil Strachan was convicted of attempting to rape an 18-month-old boy while looking after him at Hogmanay in 2005 and of downloading child pornography from websites.
However, at a previous hearing, appeal judges ruled that although Neil Strachan had swapped e-mails with co-accused James Rennie about “sharing” a baby boy, there was not enough evidence to find him guilty of a wider conspiracy.
Neil Strachan returned to the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh on Thursday, knowing he would get his minimum sentence cut due to the previous decision.
He also stood to benefit from a recent ruling by top judges, which changed the way minimum sentences are calculated for lifers other than murderers.
Lord Bonomy, sitting with Lord Kingarth, told Neil Strachan that because one of the essential charges against him had been “significantly modified” the original sentence could no longer stand.
He said that applying the new rules would lead to a further reduction.
After his trial in May 2009, Judge Lord Bannatyne described Strachan as “sadistic and aggressive”.
Do you live next to Neil Strachan because he is re-offending somewhere in the community?
At just 17, Neil Strachan’s first sex offence occurred in 1985; he was found guilty of indecency.
Neil Strachan, a youth club official and Edinburgh football referee was imprisoned for three years for routinely mistreating a five-year-old child in 1997. At the time, Sheriff Andrew Bell branded the attacks “particularly disgusting and disgraceful”.
Ironically, following a string of child sex crime events, 1997 was the year Britain launched the Sex Offers Register. From then on, any offender found guilty or cautioned for crimes carried out under the Sexual Offences Act had to be routinely reported and watched by the relevant agencies.
Fast-forward to 2009 and the end last week of a harrowing ten-week trial in which Neil Strachan emerged again from the shadows, along with seven other paedophiles, and was found guilty of a sickening sex attack on an 18-month-old toddler he was babysitting. He later sent a picture to his perverted paedophile friends in what came to be known during the trial as the “Hogmanay image”.
Neil Strachan may have been registered under the act, and a network of agencies may have monitored him well. However, none of the procedures implemented over a decade ago stopped him from offending again. Until he made a mistake in 2007 by sending his computer hard drive for repair where an alert technician spotted indecent images, no one other than his co-conspirators knew he was at the centre of a worldwide web of child pornography.
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