Husband who stabbed wife is freed after she pleads: I want him back
A MAN who stabbed his wife in the chest after a night out escaped jail yesterday after she made an impassioned plea for him to be freed.
Tony Cartney was told he would have to live with the fact he ‘caused a very serious injury to the person you love’ – and given community service.
At the High Court in Edinburgh, Lord Boyd placed Cartney on a Community Payback Order with three years’ supervision. He must also do 300 hours of unpaid work.
The sentence came after the judge read out pleas from 49-year-old Cartney’s wife Leigh, 47, that they should be reunited – and that being separated from him had been like a ‘bereavement’. Leaving court, Mrs Cartney said she was ‘relieved’.
Cartney was originally charged with attempting to murder his wife on September 8, 2018, at the family home in Arbroath, Angus. But his guilty plea to a lesser charge of assaulting her by striking her chest with a knife to her severe injury, permanent disfigurement and to the danger of her life was accepted.
On the day of the offence, the pair were drinking in Arbroath, met another couple and went to the Rams Heid bar. His wife went outside to wait for a taxi. Advocate depute Chris McKenna said: ‘The accused was very intoxicated and required assistance to the taxi.’
After they returned home, an argument broke out. Cartney went to the kitchen and returned with a
‘It was like a bereavement’
large knife, before stabbing his wife to the left side of her chest.
He then left and his wife called an ambulance in a distressed state and said her husband had stabbed her and she did not know where he had gone. Police found her kneeling on the living room floor, face down on the couch with the bloody knife used to stab her in her right hand.
Cartney was found 200 yards away, lying in long grass beside a hedge.
He later told police he could not remember his wife being assaulted. He said he had a hazy recollection of being at the house and his wife holding her chest and shouting, ‘Help’.
Lord Boyd told Cartney: ‘Your wife is clear she does not want you to go to prison and she describes the adverse effect such an outcome would have on her.’
The judge said that the enforced separation between the couple over the past year, when she was prevented from seeing Cartney due to a court order, was ‘an unhappy and stressful time for her’.
He added: ‘She describes it as a bereavement. You have been with your wife for some 25 years. There is no history of domestic abuse.
‘I am satisfied that, were I to impose a sentence of imprisonment, it would have a deleterious effect on your wife and be as much a punishment for her as it is for you.’
Kris Gilmartin, defending, said college employee Cartney had shown ‘genuine distress, guilt and remorse’ and had not drank since the incident.