Shankly told: ‘You had a choice in life and you made the wrong one’

JUDGE Knowles QC warned Shankly that ‘you fly with the crows, you get shot with the crows’.

Sentencing, he said: “You had a choice in life and you made the wrong one. It wasn’t a mistake but a quite deliberate wrong choice on your part.

“You fly with the crows you get shot with the crows.

“Do I need to shoot you dead or do I need to clip your wings? I think I need to clip your wings.

“I think you enjoyed it far more than you were saying to the probation office.

“I can only sentence you for what you’ve done but I’m fairly confident that you will have done more than is visible above the surface of the evidence in this case.

“I don’t think it’s right or necessary to put you in prison today.

“Bearing in mind how very limited your involvement was on the evidence, it sounds like a long period but that’s because there’s something that might be involvement at the very beginning and something that was involvement at the very end with nothing really in between.

“What it means is you are not going to be out enjoying the summer evenings with your friends over this summer.”