Jamie Boulton, 55, a “repeat offender”, stabbed Garry O’Neill at a flat in Primrose Street in Leith in June last year.
Judge Lady Poole told Boulton, who has 45 previous offences including serious violence and knife crime, that he had “an appalling criminal record”.
The High Court in Edinburgh heard that 69-year-old Mr O’Neill was resident in a hospital and was out for a few hours when he was fatally assaulted.
She said: “Nobody deserves to have their life ended in this way.”
Boulton, a prisoner in Edinburgh’s Saughton jail, had denied murder but was unanimously found guilty by a jury.
Testimony that his victim had somehow jumped onto the knife was dismissed as “preposterous”.
What a world we live in, a world where a man with 45 previous convictions can be defended by a KC who no doubt stood in court and, with a straight face, tried to say the victim jumped onto the knife that his client was holding.
The level of stupidity here is astounding from the courts who kept setting what is a very dangerous man free, the defences ludicrous excuses to the convict who thought he could carve somebody up and get away with it.
But there is the problem: he got away with so much over the years that he probably thought getting his brother, who was jailed for 14 months for his small part, to stash the blade and lie to the police would be enough to get away with murder.
All the usual bleeding heart excuses were wheeled out: he was depressed, he was on drugs, blah blah, and probably used those excuses time and time again as it usually worked.
But not this time. Finally, he went too far, and it’s not like the warning signs weren’t there.
A Homeland Party government would change the sentencing guidelines to ensure judges could incarcerate people with multiple previous convictions instead of being hamstrung by them.
Either that, or we change the judges!
Either way, we would see to it that people could walk the streets in the knowledge that brutes like Jamie Boulton are already behind bars or at the least fully aware of a stern custodial sentence if they put a foot wrong.
Join today and help make the criminals fear society instead of vice versa.
