A construction worker who set himself alight during a fire attack on a beauty salon in Lanarkshire had his prison sentence cut today (March 15) following a legal challenge.
Judges at the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh rejected a plea to spare Alexander Bill a jail term but ruled that the 32 months imposed on him was excessive.
They quashed the sentence imposed on him by a sheriff and jailed him for 27 months.
Bill, 35, was jailed earlier this year after admitting wilfully setting fire to an entrance door and hallway at premises in Bothwell Street, Hamilton, on May 11 in 2020, when he appeared at the Lanarkshire town's sheriff court.
A beauty salon housed in the building bore the brunt of £18,000 worth of damage caused during the blaze.
Bill and another male were seen at the premises and fuel was poured in before the fire broke out and ignited the pair.
Bill was taken to hospital after the blaze and underwent plastic surgery and skin grafts to his hands.
Lawyers acting for Bill, of Netherplace Crescent, Glasgow, lodged an appeal against the prison term imposed on him following his sentence.
Defence solicitor advocate Iain Paterson told appeal judges: "I would submit, in this day and age, sentencing an individual such as him to imprisonment ought to be a sentence of last resort."
He argued that a custodial sentence was inappropriate and that Bill could be dealt with by a community payback order with unpaid work and other measures.
Mr Paterson said: "This is a serious offence. There is no getting away from that."
He added: "It was clearly a terrible error of judgement on his part."
He said the father-of-two had been in employment without a break for many years, but suffered a breakdown in a relationship and the loss of his job.
"He then got himself involved with drink and drugs and with a wrong peer group. This was a catalogue of disaster for him," he told Lord Matthews, sitting with Lord Boyd of Duncansby.
Mr Paterson said that since the offence, Bill took steps to resolve his problems and added: "He has demonstrated appropriate insight into the wrongness of this type of offending."
He said that if the judges were not with him on his submission that a non-custodial sentence could be imposed, then the penalty passed on Bill could be seen as "excessive" given his personal circumstances and clear remorse for the crime.
Lord Matthews said they were satisfied that the sheriff was entitled to jail Bill, who had never previously been imprisoned, for the offence but accepted that there was force in the submission that the sentence was excessive.
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