The prison sentence for Aaron Campbell, the teenager who abducted, raped and murdered Alesha MacPhail has been reduced by three years.
On Tuesday three judges ruled the minimum sentence should be reduced from 27 years to 24 years.
“I feel angry, upset and I’m losing the trust or the faith I had in the justice system to protect people,” MacPhail’s uncle Calum John MacPhail, told ITV News.
“The justice system has been give give give to him and take away from us.”
Campbell, who is now 17, was found guilty at the High Court in Glasgow earlier this year and handed a life sentence with a minimum of 27 years before he could be considered for parole.
Campbell took the six-year-old from her bed at her grandparents’ home on the Isle of Bute on July 2 last year.
A jury found him guilty unanimously following a nine-day trial. He later admitted the crime to those assessing him.
At his sentencing in March, Judge Lord Matthews described Campbell as a “calculating and remorseless” individual who had shown “not a flicker of remorse”. Campbell won the right to appeal his life sentence in May.
His solicitor argued that, given Campbell’s young age, the sentence was “excessive and amounts to a miscarriage of justice”, the Evening Times reported.
His appeal was heard before three judges at the Criminal Appeal Court in Edinburgh, with Alesha’s parents Robert MacPhail and Georgina Lochrane in the gallery.
According to the Evening Times, the judges who heard Campbell’s appeal determined that a minimum punishment of 24 years would be “appropriate to reflect the appellant’s youth”.
