Jailed for five years, profoundly deaf thug who drove car at two police officers
George Drinnan, 39, repeatedly tried to strike PCs Matthew Rhind and Younis Yaqub with his BMW in Dundee in February 2023.
The High Court in Edinburgh heard the repeat offender was driving without insurance and had been banned from driving at the time.
Drinnan, originally from Dundee, was originally charged with attempted murder - but it was reduced to a charge of assault to danger of life following a trial.
He was found guilty of endangering the lives of the two officers at the High Court in Stirling in February.
Yesterday, he returned to the dock in the Scottish capital for sentencing before judge Lady Tait.
She heard submissions from defence advocate George Gebbie who told her Drinnan's deafness would affect his ability to communicate with others whilst in custody.
However, Lady Tait told Drinnan - who had the help of a British Sign Language interpreter to understand proceedings - that he needed to go to prison for his crimes.
She said: 'The circumstances of these offences mean that the only appropriate sentence is a custodial one.
'The court must seek to deter such offending behaviour.'
At the start of the trial Drinnan's co-accused Paul Coombs pled guilty to a dangerous driving offence committed during the same incident.
He also admitted driving without insurance and while disqualified.
The 53-year-old, who was also aided by a BSL interpreter, admitted reversing and striking a parked car, causing it to hit another vehicle then driving at speed towards a parked police car.
His advocate David Adams said his client's hearing disability had led to difficulties in life.
He said: 'He's led a rather isolated life in England.
'When he's not remanded he doesn't really have any accommodation.
'He's had a long-term drug abuse issue.
'Since being remanded he's been provided with medication which has assisted him greatly in managing it.'
Mr Adams said if Coombs were to be freed, arrangements had been put in place for homeless accommodation.
He added: 'The period of driving by Mr Coombs was limited - he wasn't driving around Dundee, he was in the passenger seat of the co-accused.
'He drove for a short period.
'He accepts fully he should never have got behind the wheel and he shouldn't have driven in that manner. He apologises.'
Lady Tait banned Coombs from driving for a total of six years and imprisoned him for 18 months.
Yesterday, the court heard Drinnan had previous convictions for dishonesty, driving without insurance and driving whilst disqualified.
Mr Gebbie told Lady Tait that his client was 'profoundly deaf' who had difficulties communicating with people adding the disability would impact on how he would deal with life in prison.
He added: 'He is unable to communicate with people who aren't skilled in sigh language. This will affect his ability to communicate with others.
'This will affect his ability to interact with others prisoners.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
The spirit of the G8 ‘make poverty history' summit of 2005 seems long gone
Twenty years ago this weekend, the leaders of the world's most powerful countries, chaired by Tony Blair, gathered at the Scottish golf resort of Gleneagles and made a series of historic promises on debt relief and overseas aid. It was the culmination of a long-running campaign involving charities, churches and celebrities and benefited from the passionate commitment of Gordon Brown, for whom international development is a lifelong cause. A few days before, more than 200,000 campaigners had gathered in Edinburgh and formed a noisy, joyful human chain, demanding that the world's leaders 'make poverty history'. As a result of the momentum created and the promises made, international aid increasedand 36 countries eventually had their crippling overseas debts drastically reduced. There are many reasons it would be hard to envisage a Gleneagles summit today. The certainties of the early noughties, when globalisation felt like an unstoppable force underpinning economic growth and restraining inflation, are long gone. Just three and a half years after Gleneagles, Brown, by then prime minister, was hosting a meeting of the G20 in London's Docklands, at which global leaders scrambled to respond to the havoc wreaked by the global financial crash. Old certainties were cast aside, relationships strained and the claim to leadership of the G8 industrialised countries was hopelessly undermined by the fact that the crisis originated on their doorstep. The resulting deep recessions in many wealthy countries raised questions about voters' commitment to global causes. In the UK, public support for development, once solid enough to encourage David Cameron to embrace the target of spending 0.7% of national income on aid, started to fall away from about 2012-13. More recently, the world has become a much more fragmented, multipolar place. Middle-income countries such as China and India have demanded more prominence on the global stage. Russia's territorial aggression in Ukraine prompted its expulsion from the G8 – now the G7 – and killed off any lingering hopes that free trade and capitalism would ultimately usher in liberal democracy. Global solidarity was hard to summon, then, even before Donald Trump's second term unleashed chaos in the global trading system. The budgets of many rich-country governments have taken a battering from repeated economic shocks, at the same time as pressure mounts for more defence spending to confront potential threats. Labour ministers are quite right when they say 'the world has changed'. Yet despite the more fraught global backdrop, the campaigners who worked alongside Blair and Brown at Gleneagles and beyond have been profoundly shocked by the British government's casual disregard of development. Three years ago, Keir Starmer was promising to undo Boris Johnson's 'misguided' decision to absorb the Department for International Development back into the Foreign Office. Labour's manifesto dropped this idea. It suggested the UK had 'lost influence' as a result of the Tories' neglect of international development and promised to 'turn the page to rebuild Britain's reputation', restoring aid to 0.7% 'as soon as fiscal circumstances allow'. Instead, Labour slashed the aid budget, with little discussion, when Starmer wanted to promise Trump he would raise defence spending on his White House trip in February. Jenny Chapman, the development minister who replaced Anneliese Dodds when she resigned in protest at this deep budget cut, has insisted the UK still wants to lead on development. Yet it is hard to take the moral high ground while admitting that no area of policy, including projects to support women and girls' health and education, will be safe from the cuts. Labour has said it wants to create respectful partnerships with developing countries; but Save the Children UK's director, Moazzam Malik, told me recently that the cuts would be felt by many countries not as a new-found era of collaboration but as a withdrawal. As the UK steps back at the same time as Trump is dismantling USAID, the challenges in some of the world's poorest countries have only intensified. In particular, a blizzard of recent expert reports has called for action on the unsustainable debts squeezing many governments' budgets. The UN-backed Financing for Development conference in Seville last week ended with promises of reform, including the wider use of 'pause clauses' to halt repayments during natural disasters, for example – something the UK has supported. More radical solutions that might have included debt write-offs did not make it through the negotiations, but South Africa hopes to use its chairmanship of the G20 to press for more progress in the coming months. Michael Jacobs, a former Brown adviser, now a visiting professor at the Overseas Development Institute, insists there was a sense of momentum on debt relief in Seville. 'It was the single most significant topic of debate. There is rising pressure on the creditor countries – including China – to act. So, as in 2005, the moment for a new international debt relief package may be arriving,' he said. Other campaigners returned from Seville notably downbeat, however, pointing to the difficulties of assembling a global coalition of the willing on development in a time of tight budgets and fraying international bonds. Summoning the spirit of Gleneagles may be too much to hope for, two decades on. But after a string of economic shocks and as the climate emergency accelerates, the moral imperative to act remains – even if this Labour government can't find it in a focus group or on a spreadsheet.
Times
6 hours ago
- Times
Brian Cox: ‘Wealth? I get embarrassed'
Brian Cox is back in the city where he — and the foul-mouthed media tycoon Logan Roy, whom he embodied so terrifyingly in Succession — started. Newly 79, Cox is rehearsing at the Dundee Rep, his first employer after, aged 15, he landed a job as 'assistant to the assistant'. He is starring in Make It Happen, a new play by James Graham, who wrote Dear England for the National Theatre and the BBC's Sherwood. It is a fantastical take on the 2008 fall of the mighty Royal Bank of Scotland under the ruinous reign of its CEO Fred 'The Shred' Goodwin. Cox plays the ghost of Scotland's most famous economist, Adam Smith, who is haunting Goodwin. He is a foul-mouthed spirit. 'It's an infection from Logan,' Cox says, crediting Graham's nod to the meta. In the play Smith, who was primarily a philosopher and did not even recognise the word 'economist', is shocked that he is remembered for his book The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, rather than his earlier Theory of Moral Sentiments. The latter insisted on man's obligations to his fellow citizens; the former has come to be regarded as a panegyric to free markets red in tooth and claw. Yet the former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown is a fan and supports attempts to rescue Smith from co-option by 'neoliberal zealots'. He and Cox are old acquaintances. Brown, the actor tells me, would write to him from Downing Street complaining that people were always telling him to smile. So, I say, Laurence Olivier persuaded Mrs Thatcher to take elocution lessons, and Cox taught Brown to smile? 'No, I didn't tell him to smile,' he replies. 'I just said, 'Be yourself.'' For Cox these weeks in Dundee are a family reunion. In the theatre café where, as a diabetic, he is taking a somewhat urgent lunch, he recalls the day more than 60 years ago when he walked into the Rep ('not the same building, but the same ethos'). 'It's always difficult because it's so alien, you know, a working-class kid, virtually an orphan, to come into a situation like this. And that's why theatre is so important to me, because it's family. It really is family. And I've always found that it's family. Sometimes it's not a good family and sometimes it reflects what all families go through, but it's still family as far as I'm concerned.' On arriving that day he witnessed a fistfight between two actors, one of whom was Nicol Williamson, one of the greatest performers of his day. 'The air,' he writes in his delightful memoir, Putting the Rabbit in the Hat, 'was blue'. Seeing the young Cox's horror, the actor Gawn Grainger (Zoë Wanamaker's husband, who died only this May) assured him the pair 'were just a little overexcited after a night on the bevy'. I compare his nonchalance to last year when Cox was reported to Equity for losing his temper during rehearsals for a production of A Long Day's Journey Into Night. 'Nicol wouldn't have lasted two minutes today,' he says. 'It's this whole woke nonsense. You can't say boo to a goose. I mean, I just lost my temper and I said, 'I'm not losing my temper at you. I'm losing my temper at me. I'm the one who's having the problem, not you.'' • Brian Cox and his wife: 'We had four years that were pure hell' Cox, whom I have talked to several times over the past two decades, is a warm and generous interviewee and remarkably unlike Logan Roy. Nevertheless, I am reassured that he shares at least some of Roy's takes on wokery. He was certainly keeping them undercover when we talked three years ago alongside his younger and more progressive-minded wife, Nicole Ansari-Cox, whose play She/Her he was producing at the Edinburgh Fringe. She told me firmly that 'trans women are women', and her husband held his counsel. He says now he was being respectful to her work, on which she did 'a fantastic job', but he certainly does not see the trans issue as cut and dried. 'I mean, it's fine to say, 'Well, if you feel you're a boy, let's go down that route and see what that means without actually taking the ultimate step.' Or vice versa. Then you can find out. But at the moment they want to do it all too quickly. I think it creates a lot more problems. It certainly creates a lot more difficulties than it solves.' Ansari, a German actress whom he met in Hamburg while playing Lear and married in 2002, is his second wife — although you may have read she is his third. Wikipedia claims he was married for a year to Lilian Monroe-Carr between 1966 and 1967. 'That was my first mother-in-law!' he exclaims. His actual first wife was the actress Caroline Burt, who divorced him after 18 years in 1986. He was shocked, although in neither of his two memoirs does he paint himself as a devoted or faithful husband or an attentive father to their son and daughter. In contrast his two sons with Ansari have seen much more of their dad. When I first met him they were tiny and he admitted they were rather scared of him, 'this big white-haired figure'. When we spoke again in 2020, during lockdown, he gently complained that the teenagers slept all day, went 'crazy on their devices all night' and burnt popcorn at 3am. They are now in their twenties and over six foot, and he is experiencing parental nostalgia. 'I miss my boys when they were little. They were such a delight. I never felt it with my other family because I was probably too selfish and self-obsessed. But now I just miss them. I miss them terribly.' Cox barely had a paternal model to emulate. His father, a benevolent shopkeeper who lent money to needy customers, died of pancreatic cancer when he was eight. His mother, guilty for 'being on his case', subsequently suffered a series of breakdowns and Cox was largely brought up by his three sisters. 'The irony was that in many ways losing my parents empowered me in a way that I never realised. When you've lost your parents — and at that age — you're incredibly free. There's nobody telling you what to do or what to be or where to go. So the world is your oyster in a way that you didn't expect it to be your oyster. So you pursue that, which led me to the theatre.' • Brian Cox: 'I woke up stark naked holding half of my tooth' Early on he found a father figure in the actor Fulton MacKay (unjustly now mainly remembered for Ronnie Barker's sitcom Porridge), who warned him not to worry about being a star and concentrate on being a good actor. He tells me he is not sure he did want to be a star but it was sound advice anyway. Cox went on to play many of the great Shakespearean roles, including Lear and Titus Andronicus, and enjoyed later success in Hollywood, often portraying villains. Yet in his seventies, thanks to Succession, he did become a supernova of a star. Rare is the day someone does not ask him to tell them, in full Logan Roy, to 'f*** off'. My favourite Roy line comes in the last series when he discusses the chances of life after death: 'You can't know. But I've got my f***ing suspicions.' Cox long ago gave up on his family's Catholic faith but is not uninterested in the subject. 'My great fantasy now I'm in my late seventies is, 'How am I going to die?' I think, maybe I'll get run over, maybe I'll fall down stairs. A lot of people die by falling. So I'm constantly fantasising about my demise.' Believing he was written out a touch early, he has still not watched the seven Succession episodes that followed Logan's death in the final season. I recommend the Logan's funeral instalment in particular. 'I've seen bits of it. I did focus on Kieran [Culkin], who I was deeply fond of. That boy had been out of work such a long time before he did that.' And now he has won an Oscar for A Real Pain? 'For me it's the great success story of Succession that he's got his just rewards.' As for the wealth that late stardom has brought Cox, he is almost contemptuous of it. 'I haven't changed. I'm still the same and this attention to the detail of wealth freaks me out. I don't like talking about it. I get embarrassed. I've got so many clothes now. People just keep giving me clothes. I've got a stylist and all that bollocks. They were talking about how much I earn the other day and I just said, 'I don't want to know that, thank you very much. Please keep that information to yourself.' God almighty! Really? What a responsibility, living up to it apart from anything else.' • Read more theatre reviews, guides and interviews One thing wealth has brought is a separate London home for his wife, to add to the ones they share in Brooklyn and upstate New York. Partly to escape Trump's second term, they are based in Britain now, she in a three-bedroom flat, he nine minutes' walk away over Primrose Hill. He explains the arrangement as an extension of their separate bedrooms in their other homes (they 'visit' each other). 'But when I go to her flat I always feel I'm imposing. She said, 'Come, you've got to come over. Why don't you come?' I said, 'Well, it's a long walk …' Then I go and I'm fine. But I'm always a bit nervous when I go there.' After Logan's backstory was ret-conned to have him born in Dundee, the magnate revisits the city, but when driven to his family home he refuses to get out and look at it. Cox, in contrast, has been back to the cramped, bathless tenement flat he lived in as a child but he finds it painful to walk around Dundee now. 'Not because I don't love it, because I do love it. I find it painful to see the neglect. You see things like this theatre and think, 'Oh wow! Isn't this wonderful?' And the new V&A museum. But then they build that stupid building in front of the V&A!' (It houses Social Security Scotland.) Afterwards I make a trip to his childhood home a 20-minute walk from where we have been talking. It is a granite building with a view of the Tay and does not look uncared for. What surprises me as a southern Englander, however, is that you can buy a two-bedroom flat in the street for just £85,000. It is as Cox says: the wealth of the nation has not rearranged itself northwards for a very long time. And yet from this street, from a home in which three of his sisters shared one settee bed and he and his brother slept together in an alcove, there emerged this volcanic talent. Cox has come a long way, but Dundee deserves to have him back. Make It Happen is at the Dundee Rep Theatre, Jul 18-26, then at the Edinburgh International Festival, Aug 1-9,
Daily Mail
6 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Murder probe as mum is found dying in street
Tributes have been paid to a scientist who was allegedly murdered in broad daylight. Dr Fortune Gomo, 39, was attacked on Saturday afternoon as she walked on South Road in Dundee. Emergency services were alerted to the incident at around 4.25pm but she was pronounced dead at the scene. Police confirmed that following a post-mortem examination, the incident is being treated as murder and that a 20-year-old man has been arrested and charged in connection with Dr Gomo's death. A report will be submitted to the procurator fiscal and he is due to appear at Dundee Sheriff Court today. Dr Gomo, who is believed to have had a ten-year-old daughter, had moved from Zimbabwe to Scotland to complete a PhD at the University of Dundee. An expert in water conservation, Dr Gomo led initiatives to improve water and food security in both Scotland and sub-Saharan Africa, and was hailed as a 'rising star' in her field. The mother's death has been condemned as 'truly shocking' by her friends and colleagues both in Scotland and in Africa. Angela Machonesa, who studied with Dr Gomo in Zimbabwe, wrote: 'A child will now grow up without the love and presence of a mother. A family will mourn a daughter who once lit up their home with hope and promise. 'A community, ours, will ache for a friend, a sister, a schoolmate, who inspired us all. Her future was not just her own, it belonged to all of us who saw the power of what an African girl can become when given a chance and when fuelled by brilliance.' A spokesman for the University of Dundee added: 'This has been a truly shocking event in our city and for our university community. 'It will be particularly distressing for those who knew and worked with Fortune throughout her time as a PhD student and postdoctoral research assistant in geography, and for all of those in our close-knit community of African colleagues and students. 'Our thoughts are with her family and friends at this tragic time.' Members of Dundee's Zimbabwean community gathered in the city yesterday afternoon to pay their respects to Dr Gomo and demand action on spiralling crime across the country. Choking back tears, one resident told crowds: 'Why should we live in fear? Why should our kids live in fear? We demand peace.' Detective Superintendent Peter Sharp, the officer leading the inquiry, said: 'Firstly, my thoughts remain with Fortune's family at this incredibly sad time. They are being supported by specialist officers and I would ask that their privacy is respected. 'Our enquiries are continuing and I remain satisfied that the incident poses no wider risk to the public. At this early stage of the investigation we are following a number of lines of inquiry. I am also acutely aware of content circulating on social media and would urge the public not to speculate about the circumstances of the incident. The public will notice a visibly increased police presence in the area and I would encourage anyone who has any concerns to speak with our officers.' DS Sharp said it had been a 'distressing incident for those who witnessed and attended the incident' and appealed for anyone who can assist officers to contact Police Scotland on 101 or to call Crimestoppers free on 0800 555 111.
