THE persistence of gang violence stretching back for decades in one of Glasgow's housing schemes is "thoroughly depressing", Scotland's newest High Court judge said yesterday.
Lord Matthews was sentencing a teenage killer at the High Court in Glasgow, for the first time, when he recalled handling similar cases when he embarked on his legal career.
Paul Spence, 18, was found guilty at an earlier trial of the culpable homicide of a 40-year-old father of three who was trying to split up a fight between two rival gangs in Easterhouse.
John Purcell was stabbed in the street in Easterhouse Road on September 23 last year as his 11-year-old son John watched from his nearby home. He died later at Glasgow Royal Infirmary.
Lord Matthews sentenced Spence yesterday to eight years.
He said: "When I started at the bar, I was involved in cases like this. They are still going on 30 years later. It is thoroughly depressing." He told Spence: "You have your whole life ahead of you. John Purcell no longer has a life ahead of him because of what you did."
Spence attacked Mr Purcell, of Millennium Gardens, with the knife going through his arm piercing his heart.
Lord Matthews referred to "similar cases" from 30 years ago, before Glasgow underwent its regeneration, beginning with an image makeover with former Lord Provost Michael Kelly's Glasgow's Miles Better campaign to eradicate the No Mean City image of razor gangs terrorising housing estates and the city centre.
Easterhouse had previously become famous across Britain in 1968, when singer Frankie Vaughan visited the area and urged gangs to bin their weapons. Despite the transformation of the city centre and a string of successful high-profile image-promoting events, including City of Culture in 1990 and Scotland With Style, the knife culture has remained in many areas.
In the last year Strathclyde Police recorded 2665 knife or blade-carrying incidents.
The force's annual report showed in Glasgow in 2006-07 there were 33 murders, 201 attempted murders and 2644 serious assaults.
The picture could be worse as it is believed that only one in three violent crimes is reported to police.
The decades of violence and particularly knife crime among young men led to the introduction of the Violence Reduction Unit in 2004.
Detective Chief Superintendent John Carnochan, head of Strathclyde Police's Violence Reduction Unit, welcomed Lord Matthews' statement.
He said: "Over the past couple of years one of the aims of the Violence Reduction Unit has been to change attitudes towards the carrying and using of knives.
"High-profile cases and High Court judgments and opinions have a positive effect on that attitudinal change."
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