Ex-footballer who murdered partner in brutal attack loses appeal against length of life sentence punishment part

About this case:

• Citation:
  [2025] HCJAC 47
• Judgment:
  External link
• Court:
  Appeal Court of the High Court of Justiciary
• Judge:
  Lord Beckett

Mark Keel, aged 33, pled guilty to the murder of his partner Maxine Clerk at a continued preliminary hearing in April 2025, and was given a headline of 24 years for the punishment part prior to the discount. It was accepted that little could be said in mitigation of the appellant’s acts, but nonetheless he argued that the value of his plea merited a greater sentence discount.

The appeal was heard by the Lord Justice Clerk, Lord Beckett, with Lord Matthews and Lord Armstrong. McConnachie KC and Radcliffe, advocate, appeared for the appellant and Prentice KC, advocate depute, for the Crown.

Appalling crime

In the social work report prepared on the appellant, it was noted that he had a happy childhood but got in with the wrong crowd in his teens while playing professional football. He mostly funded his lifestyle through drug dealing and acquired a distrust of female partners after fathering his first child at 16 and having no contact with the child since she was two years old. The reporting social worker noted that he appeared to have a sense of entitlement towards women and tried to flirt with her when she interviewed him.

On 26 June 2024, the appellant was under a restriction of liberty order restricting him to the deceased’s address. It was the tenth anniversary of the death of his son by a previous partner, and he spent the day drinking. At around 11pm, he woke up his partner and they both took cocaine. He gave an account that the deceased goaded him about his dead son and accepted that he had reacted violently but claimed that he assumed she was drunk when she did not move.

It was agreed that there was a continuous narrative of domestic violence during the deceased’s relationship with the appellant. She was repeatedly seen to have black eyes and other visible injuries. At the time of her death, she had 51 separate injuries to her head and body and significant internal bruising. In mitigation, the appellant’s senior counsel conceded that nothing could be said in mitigation of an appalling crime, but noted the appellant was ashamed of what he had done.

Despite the noted brutality of the murder, it was submitted that the headline sentence was excessive. The reduction for the appellant’s guilty plea should have been greater, given that the deceased’s family were spared from giving evidence and the time and expense of a trial was avoided. The judge had used Kennedy v HMA (2024), in which the attack took place in front of the couple’s teenage daughter, as a yardstick, but selected a higher punishment part than the one imposed in that case.

Materially aggravating features

Lord Beckett, delivering the opinion of the court, said of the identified precedents: “They can only provide a very broad indication of what might be appropriate. That was the use that the sentencing judge properly made of the opinion in Kennedy, where the court examined Rizzo v HMA (2020) and other examples of domestic murders. It is true that there was a knife used in Kennedy, and that the deceased’s 17-year-old child was present, but the violence used by the appellant in this case was also extreme and sustained. Unlike the first offender Mr Kennedy, the appellant has a relevant record of significant previous convictions including a prison sentence imposed on indictment for domestic offending.”

He added: “The appellant was subject to a community payback order and restriction of liberty when he murdered his partner. The considerable length of time over which the appellant left his partner to die from the extreme injuries he inflicted, and his dissuading her son from seeking medical help for her, are materially aggravating features of this case absent in both Kennedy and Rizzo. Even if Mr Rizzo did not seek medical assistance immediately after he had fatally injured his partner, he had alerted people that the complainer was dead within less than 40 minutes of the murder.”

Noting that any allowance for a plea of guilty was a matter for the judge’s discretion, Lord Beckett said: “In the appellant’s case the plea was first intimated on 17 April 2025, nine and a half months after first appearance. He appears to think that pleading guilty at a preliminary hearing attracts a reduction of one-eighth in a murder case. That appears to be based on what was said in Spence v HM Advocate (2007) where the court suggested, obiter, that in a case other than murder, a reduction for a plea of guilty at preliminary hearing may be in the region of a quarter.”

He concluded: “We reiterate that this is not a matter of entitlement. The leading opinion in Gemmell v HMA (2011), where this court in sentencing of new determined that pleas of guilty of somewhat limited utilitarian value intimated two months after first appearance would attract a 30 month reduction from a headline of 12 years (21%), demonstrates that the court is concerned with how early a plea is tendered and that the extent of any reduction depends entirely on its utilitarian value. There plainly was utilitarian value in the appellant’s plea of guilty to murder where a child was not required to testify as might otherwise have been necessary but, utilitarian value is at its highest at or shortly after first appearance.”

Having determined that the sentence was not excessive, the appeal was therefore refused.