Will he be sentenced to a women’s prison?
A transgender butcher who launched a sickening sex attack on a schoolgirl while dressed as a woman should face justice as a man, a leading SNP politician said today.
Kate Forbes, who lost out on the party leadership to Humza Yousaf last month, said Andrew Miller should ‘without a shadow of a doubt’ be held in a male rather than a female prison.
Her demand came hours after Mr Yousaf refused to rule out Miller, 53, who now goes by the name Amy George, being sent to a women’s prison.
The trained butcher yesterday admitted abducting a primary school aged girl while dressed as a woman, before sexually assaulting her repeatedly over more than 24 hours.
At the High Court in Edinburgh, judge Lord Arthurson described Miller’s offending as ‘abhorrent crimes’ of the utmost ‘deviance and depravity’ which were ‘the realisation of every parent’s worst nightmare’.
Speaking to Times Radio today Ms Forbes said the public would want the brutal attacker held in a male prison.
‘It makes your skin crawl. You know, it makes me feel physically sick to hear what somebody would do to an innocent primary school girl,’ she said.
‘And from my perspective, justice has got to be served on this man.’
Miller pleaded guilty to four charges – abduction, sexual assault, watching pornography in the presence of the child under the age of 13, and possessing 242 indecent images of children.
The court heard the sex predator approached the child in February this year when she was walking home to offer her a lift. Instead of taking the child to her home, Miller took her to his home in the Scottish Borders. There, he subjected her to acts of sexual assault in his bedroom over the course of the next 27 hours.
For the time the child was confined at the property, Miller was dressed as a woman, wearing a bra and women’s underwear.
The following evening, the child escaped the bedroom while Miller was sleeping. She tried and failed to escape the property, before using the landline to call police and say she had been touched inappropriately, the court heard.
The trans butcher appeared via video link from HMP Edinburgh – Scotland’s most notorious men’s prison, where transgender rapist Isla Bryson was jailed – to plead guilty.
But asked whether he should stay there for his sentence, Mr Yousaf prevaricated with media at Holyrood.
‘No, in the male estate, where he currently is but of course what you’re asking me to do is to make a judgment on a sentencing that is still to happen. That would be inappropriate for me to do so,’ he said.
‘The Scottish Prison Service (SPS) has protocols in place, those have recently been updated in relation to some other very well publicised cases, and therefore I’m very confident in any risk assessment SPS makes in this regard.’