News

A man who robbed a bank with a banana has been sentenced to 14 months in prison. Laurence James Vonderdell, 50, admitted offences of robbery and possessing an imitation firearm – a banana covered with an orange plastic bag.

Men prosecuted for same-sex sexual activity which is now entirely legal will be able to apply to have their convictions erased from October. Legislation passed unanimously by the Scottish Parliament last year will grant an automatic pardon to every man in Scotland criminalised for breaching homophob

A former Rangers administrator has been paid £80,000 in compensation over an order to freeze his assets that the Lord Advocate admitted was "wrongful", The Herald reports. David Whitehouse, 52, of Duff and Phelps, has been seeking £180,000 in damages against Lord Advocate James Wolffe QC

Glasgow-based solicitor John Frame has won the Law Society of Scotland’s In-house Rising Star Award for 2019. Mr Frame, legal director for transport in UK & Europe at Serco, has played a major role in the business, quickly becoming a trusted and valued colleague. He was appointed to the ro

The Scottish government is seeking views on plans to introduce a legal duty on Scottish public authorities to notify Police Scotland about suspected human trafficking and exploitation victims. Information collected through the ‘duty to notify’ will provide a more accurate picture of the

Family law expert Denise Laverty has joined Gilson Gray. Ms Laverty is a dual qualified family and divorce lawyer and accredited family law specialist with over 26 years’ experience in Scotland and England.

The Faculty of Advocates’ Jacqueline Fordyce has been elected to the board of Howard League Scotland, the independent penal reform organisation. She said: "I am delighted to have been appointed to the board of Howard League Scotland with the opportunity to work as part of a multi-disciplinary

Since the announcement last week that a fatal accident inquiry is to be held into the Super Puma helicopter crash off Shetland in August 2013, there has been a vociferous response criticising the delay of almost six years, writes Lisa Gregory. While perhaps in the minority, there will be some who wi

Stuart McWilliams stresses the importance of registration for EU nationals ahead of Brexit. In recent months, I have spent a lot of time meeting with EU nationals concerned about their status once the UK leaves the EU. As negotiations in Parliament drag on, and with a Conservative leadership el

The Police Investigations & Review Commissioner (PIRC) has found that police were justified in using a baton on a man with a history of violence who threatened to stab one of the officers pursuing him. Officers arrived in the Rutherglen area of Glasgow on the afternoon of 21 January 2019 after p

The quality of Marks & Clerk patent prosecution and litigation services has been recognised worldwide in the most recent analysis from IAM Patent 1000, a directory of intellectual property firms. The Marks & Clerk team in Scotland was ranked 'gold tier'. The team is noted for its commitment

A judge in Minneapolis has sentenced lawyer Paul Hansmeier to 14 years' imprisonment for a scheme which saw him upload pornographic material to file-sharing networks before threatening to sue people who downloaded them, Ars Technica reports. “It is almost incalculable how much your abuse of tr

Thousands of criminal cases are being reviewed after the family of a judge said he had been going to work drunk. The allegations were made in guardianship papers filed by the family of Judge William T. Marshall, 62, an elected judge in southern Ohio.

Prosecutors have successfully appealed against a sheriff’s decision to acquit a landlord accused of racially aggravated harassment after he called a tenant a “f*cking black bastard”. The sheriff acquitted the respondent because the Crown failed to lead any evidence to sho

New hate crime figures published today by the Crown Office show that racial crime remains the most commonly reported hate crime with 2,880 charges in 2018-19. Sexual orientation aggravated crime is the second most common type of hate crime with 1,176 charges reported in 2018-19, an increase of five