Fury after rabbit killer treated more harshly than death builder

Safety campaigners are furious after the death of a rabbit was treated more seriously by the courts than the death of a construction worker.

This week a Scottish construction company and one of its directors was convicted of failing to ensure proper health & safety standards after the death of one of its workers, Andrezej Freitag, who fell 3 m down an exhaust shaft in a block of flats being built in Dundee on 29th May 2008, and later died of his injuries.

On the same day Steven Appleton was in court convicted of causing unnecessary suffering to a rabbit at Magistrates Court in  Caerphilly after he stamped it to death.

Mr Freitag’s employers, Discovery Homes (Scotland) Ltd of High Street Kinross, were fined £5,000 for breaching Section 2 (1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974. A Director of the company, Richard Lionel Pratt, who was also the site manager, was fined £4,000 after being convicted of breaching Section 37 (1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974.

Steven Appleton was given a six month custodial sentence.

Sharon Norman, a member of Families Against Corporate Killers, has written to the Prime Minister to protest.

She said: "When I read the two news reports above and the outrageously different penalties handed down by our courts to the killer of a rabbit and the killers of a man, I was so angry and I had to e-mail the Prime Minister. I asked him to explain to me how this could be right.

"Every year many more people are given custodial and suspended sentences for animal cruelty than have ever been given such sentences for killing a worker.  We don’t condone animal cruelty but cruelty to people that devastates families must surely be more serious?"