Convicted killer Adam Gallagher has been acquitted of keeping a deadly weapon behind bars.
Guards found a makeshift razor in the 35-year-old murderer’s cell at Perth Prison.
Gallagher went on trial at the city’s sheriff court, accused of possessing an offensive weapon.
After one day of evidence, jurors unanimously found him not guilty.
Solicitor Nick Whelan, defending, argued that there was no clear evidence to link the item to his client.
He suggested the weapon may have been left in the cell by someone else.
‘Perhaps a coincidence’
Gallagher is serving a life sentence for the 2005 murder of fruit picket Marek Smrz in Arbroath.
In 2017, he made legal history by becoming the first prisoner in Scotland to be sentenced via video link after a court decided he was too dangerous to appear in person.
This week’s trial heard that two Perth prison officers carried out a routine search of Gallagher’s cell on January 5 2021.
A weapon, described as an open razor embedded in a plastic handle, was found underneath a bed.
Officers told the trial they believed Gallagher was the sole occupant of the cell.
Mr Whelan said to the jury: “You cannot legally possess something if you don’t know it was there in the first place.”
He said: “It is perhaps a coincidence that this item was found his in cell.
“We have heard no DNA evidence.
“The Crown has not excluded the possibility that someone else was living in this cell at the time.”
Procurator fiscal depute Michael Dunlop had urged jurors to convict Gallagher.
“I put it to you that this was Mr Gallagher’s makeshift weapon which he had hidden under his cell,” he said.
“He was the sole occupant of this cell.”
It was one of 153 handmade and improvised weapons found at the jail since 2019.
Arbroath murder
The jury took just over an hour to deliver its verdict.
Gallagher was then formally acquitted by Sheriff Paul Brown.
He was jailed in 2006 – when he was 18 – for the murder of Czech Marek Smrz in Arbroath’s Marketgate.
The court heard he stabbed his victim through the heart with a steak knife after finding him slumped in the street.
Mr Smrz, a former waiter, had only arrived in Scotland three months earlier and had been working at East Seaton farm.
Doctors said Mr Smrz could not have survived the violent attack, even if it had been committed “in a hospital car park”.
The case made headlines after prosecutors deemed Gallagher too dangerous to bring to court. He was eventually sentenced via video link.
