Dear All
He is out!
Scotland’s Nelson Mandela, political prisoner Tommy Sheridan has been allowed out of prison on home leave.
It is only temporary, he has to go back.
The release is to prepare Tommy Sheridan to integrate back into the free world.
While clamped up in prison Sheridan has been a model prisoner which is the quickest way out.
Wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and looking leaner from his time behind bars, Sheridan arrived unheralded at the city’s Buchanan Street Bus station at 11am.
There then followed an emotional reunion with his wife Gail, the first time the couple have been together outside of a prison’s walls since he was sentenced.
As part of his release he is barred from talking to the press but he managed to give the snappers a wave.
Who turned up in droves, Sheridan is in disgrace but the current News International problems make him a person of interest.
At the front door, the only real victim of the Tommy Sheridan downfall was waiting to greet him.
His six-year-old daughter Gabrielle, who ran out of the house to embrace him yelling “Daddy!” at the top of her voice.
Sheridan said:
“I’m under strict instructions that I can’t do anything. I can get photos taken out in the street but I can’t invite anyone in and I can’t make any further comment.”
Sheridan was slammed up for three years in January after being found guilty of lying in court during his successful defamation case against the now defunct News of the World in 2006.
He had claimed the newspaper’s allegations that he had attended a sex club were untrue.
The jury thought otherwise and by 8 to 6, he was imprisoned.
I am surprised that the result was so close because the evidence against him was compelling.
Videotape, George McNeilage who made the tape, the people at the meeting who said he confessed and witnesses who saw they saw him in Mnachester plus the Danish woman Katrine Trolle who said that Tommy Sheridan done her.
Sheridan’s return home is the start of a series of visits, which are all part of the rehabilitation process for convicts who have been moved to an open prison.
Is Tommy Sheridan rehabilitated?
As he said he was wrong to lie to the Court?
No!
He maintains his ‘innocence’ of all wrongdoing.
Sheridan is expected to return to prison within a few days, but there remainds the possibility that he could be freed with an electronic tag in October.
Just in time to start campaign to get his wife elected if she stands for the Glasgow City Council elections in 2012.
What she campaigns on isn’t certain but the Solidarity Party needs a rebranding and a whole raft of new policies and a name change.
Sheridan has damaged Solidarity so that it is toxic in the minds of the voters.
People just can’t take them seriously.
And that means they won’t vote in the numbers needed to win seats.
Last night, Sheridan’s lawyer, Aamer Anwar said:
“Mr Sheridan is being released from prison on a home visit. He is going to be with his family and that’s something he has waited a long time for. We would request that he be given his privacy.”
Earlier this month, Mr Anwar handed in a dossier to Strathclyde Police which he says contains the details of private information of individuals north of the Border accessed by the News of the World.
That evidence of possible wrongdoing doesn’t clear Tommy Sheridan.
Anwar has also called on officers to carry out an investigation to establish if any the News of the World executives lied during evidence at Sheridan’s perjury trial.
Tit for tat!
I suspect the prize is Andy Coulson, the Sheridan camp would love to get Coulson convicted and sentenced to a term in a Scottish prison.
Tom Fox, of the Scottish Prison Service handling the press for Tommy Sheridan’s release said that convicts, in this case Sheridan, are allowed home leave but have to comply with a number of conditions, which vary from prisoner to prisoner.
He added:
“People that are allowed home visits are assessed as having a low risk of reoffending and of being no danger to the public. The visits can last as little as a day or be as long as a week, and are all part of the process of easing someone back into the community.”
At the end of the Tommy Sheridan trial, he was sentenced to 3 years in prison, I disagreed with that sentence but understand the idea behind it.
Lying in court is a serious offence.
But Sheridan with all his faults wasn’t a danger to society.
He is doing his time and claiming innocence because when he gets out he goes back on the campaign trial.
And the narrative will possibly be he was a wrongfully convicted man.
He may think that narrative if said loud and often will convince people on the doorsteps, Tommy Sheridan stood up ‘against the man’ and went to prison for his beliefs.
If he wants to turn round his political fortunes then he can’t live in the past and live in denial.
He will just be another political ‘leader’ fostered on the public whom the public will just reject at the ballot box.
Yours sincerely
George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University
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