Three bungling kidnappers have been jailed for snatching a man from the street and wounding him in what a court was told may have been a dispute about drugs.
Adam Maxwell, Adam Powney and Regan White kidnapped 28-year-old Adam Scoble in broad daylight in The Avenue, in Brighton, in January last year.
The three men attacked him, hitting him with a brick in front of witnesses and in view of security cameras, and bundled him into a black Audi.
Judge Anne Arnold said that they threatened to cut Mr Scoble’s arteries and watch him bleed to death.
She said that they also threatened to douse him with the contents of a bottle of Lucozade which Mr Scoble said that he feared was a corrosive substance.
The judge said: “Adam Scoble was bundled into the back of an Audi, driven around in what he said was a frightening manner and then dropped off at his mother’s house.
“Mr Scoble described the events as the most horrific that he had experienced in his life.”
A jury convicted the three men of kidnap and wounding with intent at Brighton Crown Court last Friday (5 February) at the end of a two-week trial.
They were cleared of having a knife although Mr Scoble said that they had one.
At Hove Crown Court this afternoon (Friday 12 February), Julian Winship accepted that it was not proved that the reason for the three men forcing Mr Scoble into a car was drug-related.
But, given the evidence and the “county lines” drugs backdrop, it seemed the most likely explanation.
Powney, 34, formerly of Lewes Crescent, Brighton, was jailed for five years for kidnap and a year, to run concurrently, for wounding. He was ordered to pay a victim surcharge of £181.
Maxwell, 20, of Curlender Close, Birkenhead, and formerly of Lewes Crescent, Brighton, was jailed for four years for kidnap and a year to be served concurrently for wounding.
Separately, Maxwell admitted dealing crack cocaine and heroin on another occasion and was jailed for three years and nine months, to run consecutively.
He also admitted having crack cocaine on another occasion – and trying to swallow the drugs when he was caught by the police on Brighton seafront.
He was jailed for six months, to run concurrently, making a sentence of seven years and nine months in total. He is already in Elmley young offender institution, in Kent.
