Kilmarnock rapist freed pending appeal

Feb 5 2010

A RAPE victim this week spoke of her horror on hearing that her attacker had been released only five months after being sentenced.

Former prison officer Cameron Lawson was jailed for four-and-a-half years last September after a jury found him guilty of raping the mother-of-three at his Kilmarnock home.

Now he has been set free, pending an appeal against his conviction.

“I just don’t understand it,” said the 32-year-old victim.

“It is like going through it all over again.”

She is particularly concerned that, while Lawson has been barred from entering her street, he has not been banned from going into Cumnock, where she lives.

“I live just round the corner from his parents,” she pointed out.

Police went to the victim’s home to break the news and discuss installing security equipment.

But, when she phoned the number the officers gave her, she was told that she was not considered “at high risk”.

“I was told if a judge saw it fit to release him into the community, he can’t be much of a risk,” she said.

Her mother told the Standard: “We are absolutely disgusted. We can’t believe they have let him go.”

Prosecutors had asked the High Court in Edinburgh to keep 38-year-old Lawson in custody pending his appeal.

But Lord Uist granted him interim liberation on the basis of his “solid” grounds of appeal and because he had no previous convictions.

During the rape trial at the High Court in Kilmarnock the jury heard that Lawson, 28, stripped and sexually assaulted his victim after she passed out following a drinking session.

And when she woke up screaming in terror he covered her mouth and raped her.

At the time her victim expressed her “disgust” at the length of the sentence.