A violent thug bit another prisoner’s ear off during a savage brawl in a jail.
Gary Bradley viciously battered Jamie Cunningham with a pool cue and dragged him to the floor before pinning him down, a court heard.
Prison officers at HMP Addiewell in West Lothian battled to drag Bradley off his victim, but they were too late to prevent him carrying out the horrific assault.
Bradley, 36, formerly from Greenock, pleaded guilty at Livingston Sheriff Court on Monday to assaulting his fellow inmate to his severe injury and permanent disfigurement on 1 March last year.
The prosecution accepted that he was acting under provocation after Mr Cunningham had thrown the first punch.
The court was shown video of the incident in which Bradley is seen taking objection to a comment apparently made by Mr Cunningham and remonstrating with him.
Mr Cunningham gets up off his seat and starts swinging punches at Bradley who instantly retaliates.
The fight is broken up almost immediately, but Bradley is then seen lunging forward and using the pool cue to repeatedly hit Mr Cunningham on the head and body before both end up on the floor.
It’s then that Bradley straddles the other prisoner and pins him down before biting off his left ear and spitting it out.
Roshni Joshi, prosecuting, said: “It’s clearly a situation where the participants get into some kind of argument which then escalates into a fight. The first punch was thrown by the complainer.
“The accused strikes him repeatedly both with his fists and the cue before taking him in an embrace and biting his ear off. That had been salvaged.”
She said Mr Cunningham was taken to St John’s Hospital in Livingston for surgical reconstruction of his ear, which required a skin graft.
Gary Miller, defending, said Bradley accepted the seriousness of the offence and that the violence he used, although initially to defend himself, had been disproportionate.
He told the court: “The positive I take from this is that, notwithstanding the record before the court, he said something to me I found fairly profound.
“He said: ‘I’ve had sentence after sentence and I’ve never had a chance’. He accepts that’s because of his own behaviour.”
Mr Miller said Bradley’s motivation to change for the better was prompted by his desire to be released as soon as possible in order to provide stability for his 12-year-old son who was currently living apart from his mother.
He added that the accused had taken part in a restorative justice programme which facilitated meetings and discussions between aggrieved people. That had resulted in goodwill between Bradley and his victim, who had hugged and exchanged handshakes.
Sheriff Jane Farquharson told Bradley she intended to impose an extended sentence on him so he could be supported by social workers following his eventual release from prison.
She said she could not pass such a sentence without first obtaining a criminal justice social work report so deferred sentence for two weeks for the report to be prepared.
Following Bradley’s latest conviction, it emerged that the former actor’s past criminal record included a five year sentence of detention for serious assault.
He was also jailed for four years in February 2015 for biting off part of a 64-year-old Kathleen Hainey’s finger after she bravely tried to stop him fighting a man on a bus.
During that incident he repeatedly sunk his teeth into a man who went to the aid of 19-year-old Nicole Shirley who the accused had drunkenly persisted in talking to against her wishes.
When Brian Thomas offered to get off at the same stop as the teenager to protect her Bradley punched the older man and bit him on the head and left forearm.
He cited “anger management problems” for contributing to the earlier biting attacks.
Bradley was subsequently imprisoned for more than three years in May 2019 for battering a man with a hammer during a brutal street fight during which his target stabbed him in the neck with a screwdriver.
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