Heinous

with us for a while and who have been subject to a series of assessments going on over a number of years before they get to that stage.” But he said the “testing” of offenders in the community through home leave happened before parole because it was a “fundamental part” of the consideration for any board.

A critical incident review has been conducted by the prison service and this will now feed into the serious incident review, which is being carried out by MAPPA.

But prison chiefs say that during the 2016/17 financial year there were 19,000 days of home leave for Scottish prisoners while there were only 27 occasions when there was a revocation of an offender’s licence for “breach of conditions.” When Linda Mcdonald left her Dundee home on 7 August last year she had expected a pleasant summer walk with her dog in the city’s Templeton Woods beauty spot.

She could not have anticipated running into a convicted murderer, a notorious figure jailed for life for stabbing to death another female dog walker when he was just 15.

Robbie Mcintosh – known in his home town as the Law Killer after he stabbed Anne Nicoll, 34, to death on the city’s Law hill in 2001 – had been granted