A woman who was violently assaulted in a car park while pregnant has branded a sheriff’s decision to hand her abuser unpaid work an “insult to every domestic abuse victim”.
Serial domestic abuser Sammy Stewart was found guilty following a trial at Aberdeen Sheriff Court of assaulting Lynette Sangster by choking her on two occasions in 2017.
He also grabbed her hair and tried to pull her out of a car while she was heavily pregnant.
As an alternative to a prison sentence, he was given 200 hours of unpaid work and ordered to stay away from Ms Sangster for 12 months.
Visibly upset, she described the sentence handed down by Sheriff Janys Scott KC as “a disgrace”.
“I’m devastated. I reported him to protect other women and I’ve basically wasted my time,” Ms Sangster said.
“He should be behind bars. What he did still affects me now.”
Stewart, an Army veteran who previously completed a charity bike ride from Aberdeen to Arbroath in 2021, has one previous conviction for domestic assault and two previous assault convictions.
During the first incident, at Ms Sangster’s address in Kemnay on May 20 2017, Stewart throttled her after an evening in the pub.
Taking to the witness stand, the woman told the court she had asked Stewart to leave the address when the incident happened.
She said: “He didn’t like me telling him to leave, to the extent I had my hair pulled and he grabbed my throat.
“It was that tight, I couldn’t actually breathe, but it lasted seconds before he let go.”
She described being pinned against a door frame by her throat, and her son – who was 15 at the time – coming downstairs and screaming at Stewart to leave.
‘The mental scars are still there’
In a second incident outside Kemnay Golf Club, on November 4 2017, Stewart again grabbed Ms Sangster by the hair and throat – this time while she was pregnant – and violently pulled her from a car.
She told the court at trial that Stewart choked her into my seat by her throat, “so I couldn’t breathe”, adding that he then “pulled me by my hair out of the car”.
Asked by fiscal depute Victoria Kerr how the incidents had affected her, the woman said she had been left “mentally damaged”.
She explained: “The physical scars were few and far between but the mental scars are still there.”
Sentencing Stewart, Sheriff Scott said: “This is a serious matter and, given Mr Stewart’s previous convictions, I would have been considering a custodial sentence if it were not for the antiquity is the case.”
Reacting to the decision, Ms Sangster branded the decision “a joke”.
“I’m really angry. I’m devastated that I’ve not got justice,” she said, fighting back tears.
“This type of decision makes women think there’s no point in reporting these kinds of men.
“It’s taken three years to get to court because of Covid – that’s not my fault. If I could have gone straight to court on the day I reported him, I would have.
“He’s walking away smiling today while I’m sitting here crying into a cup of tea, basically.
“I could have lost my baby.”
Ms Sangster added that, given Stewart’s previous convictions for violence, the one-year non-harassment order imposed upon him doesn’t make her feel safe in her own home.
“This sentence is not only an insult to myself, but every domestic abuse victim out there,” she said.
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