A killer from Angus threatened prison officers with a weapon during a hospital visit, a court was told.
Ross Anderson, who stabbed a friend to death in Montrose in 2008, grabbed a doctor’s scissors in a treatment room at St John’s Hospital in Livingston.
High on drugs, he ordered his prison guards to unlock his handcuffs and set him free.
The violent thug – given an extended sentence of 11 and a half years for culpable homicide in 2009 – told his guards: “You know what I’m in for, give me the f***ing keys.”
Prison officers Robbie Nimmo and Liam Park managed to restrain Anderson and seize the scissors from him, depute fiscal Roshni Joshi told Livingston Sheriff Court.
Anderson, 31, a prisoner at HMP Addiewell, pled guilty to behaving in a threatening and aggressive manner and uttering threats and demands to the prison officers on May 11 2021.
He was sentenced to 15 months for the latest offence, although the court was told he had already been recalled to prison for breaching his licence conditions and would not qualify for parole until June or July 2023.
Montrose killing
Anderson, from Arbroath, was originally charged with murder in 2008 after stabbing Brechin teenager Adam Paton, 17, to death in the spring of 2008.
He was just 16 at the time.
He was found guilty of the culpable homicide following a seven-day trial at the High Court in Aberdeen in 2009.
It later emerged that before he attacked his friend in Montrose on April 24 2008 he had been released on bail – for the second time – just weeks after being charged with a catalogue of violent crimes.
The trial heard the pair had been in a group of youths drinking and taking drugs at the flat in the town’s North Street before a fight broke out and Paton was stabbed.
Took drugs before prison attack
Alan Smith, defending Anderson in Livingston this week, claimed his client had suffered from long periods of depression in custody, with incidences of self-harm and substance abuse.
He said: “He had consumed a significant amount of Etizolam so his recollection of events in hospital is hazy, but he entirely accepts the Crown’s narrative.”
Sheriff Peter Hammond told Anderson via a CCTV link to prison that only a custodial sentence was appropriate.
However, the sheriff said he was prepared to make it run concurrently with Anderson’s present sentence rather than consecutively.
Previous sentencing
Sentencing Anderson for the killing in 2008, judge Lord Carloway told him he accepted that he had had an “emotionally traumatic” life.
He was born in Cornton Vale Prison to a mother then addicted to heroin and an abusive father who had died in police custody.
The judge said: “It is hard to imagine a more deprived and tragic start to life.
“However, it is equally clear that your adoptive parents tried very hard to compensate for that early start by providing you with a comfortable lifestyle and the potential for a good education and future life.
“Whatever the psychological reasons for it, you spurned their attempts to help you and engaged in a life of substance, drug and alcohol abuse and, ultimately, crime.
“This lifestyle culminated in the death of another young man at the start of his adult life.”
He said that had it not been for the defence of provocation, there was little doubt that the repeated blows which Anderson had delivered with a knife, especially those to the front of the chest through the heart and liver and to the back to the lung, would have to have been regarded as murderous.
He added: “These blows were struck by you, having consciously removed a kitchen knife from the flat for use in the street.
“The court cannot but regard this culpable homicide as a particularly serious one.
“Despite your youth, you are a continuing danger to members of the public.”
In 2018 Anderson absconded from Castle Huntly and went drinking in Edinburgh, Dundee and Glasgow before eventually being traced and arrested at a children’s skate park in Glasgow Green.
