Colin John MacLean Sutherland

The Hon Lord Carloway (Colin John MacLean Sutherland) is a Scottish judge.

According to a biographical note provided by the Scottish Courts Service:

Lord Carloway was appointed a Judge in February 2000. He is a graduate of Edinburgh University (LLB Hons) and was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1977. He served as an Advocate Depute from 1986 to 1989 and was appointed Queen’s Council in 1990. From 1994 until his appointment as a Judge he was Treasurer of the Faculty of Advocates.

He is an assistant editor of “Green’s Litigation Styles” and contributed the chapters on “Court of Session Practice” to the Stair Memorial Encyclopaedia and “Expenses” in Court of Session Practice. Lord Carloway was the joint editor of “Parliament House Portraits: the Art Collection of the Faculty of Advocates” and is a former president of the Scottish Arts Club.

On becoming a judge Sutherland 'had to choose a different name for his judicial title as there is already a Lord Sutherland on the Bench. Carloway is a village on Lewis where Mr Sutherland's mother hails from and where he has a family home. Lord Carloway, 45, the son of a Falkirk solicitor, was educated at Larbert Primary, Hurst Grange Prep School, and Edinburgh Academy. He was called to the Bar in 1977 and became a Queen's Counsel in 1990. He was an advocate-depute, prosecuting in the High Court, between 1986 and 1989, when he appeared for the Crown in the first case where a husband in Scotland was charged with raping his wife while they were still living together. He argued successfully that rape should be regarded as a crime of violence.'

In 2002, Lord Carloway presided over the prosecution of Transco for killing a family of 4 in Larkhall, the first prosecution of a company in Scotland for the offence of homicide. Carloway ruled that: "It may well be that in England there is a need to identify a particular person who could, if charged, also have been guilty of manslaughter, before a company can be found to have committed that crime. It is not a requirement under the Scots law of culpable homicide." A Court of Appeal ruling later upheld Transco’s appeal and ruled that the charge of homicide was not valid in this case. In a subsequent prosecution for breaches of the Health and Safety at Work Act, Carloway imposed a record fine of £15 million on the company. Sentencing Transco in the High Court, Lord Calloway noted: “the company have chosen to attempt to blame the explosion on an internal pipe leak (that is, something for which they are not responsible) despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary including the views of their own employees on the site after the explosion. There was no evidence at all in this case that such an internal leak had occurred. That aspect of the defence by the company serves only to demonstrate that the corporate mind of Transco has little or no remorse for this tragedy which, they ought at least now to accept, was exclusively of their own creation.”