Former Falkirk chairman Gary Deans spared jail after being caught with obscene videos of dogs

The former chairman of a Scottish Premiership football club has been spared jail after being caught with a video of sexual activity with a dog.

Gary Deans, ex-chairman of Falkirk Football Club, was sentenced to 300 hours unpaid work, placed on the sex offenders’ register for three years, and ordered to attend a sex offenders’ risk reduction programme.

Deans, 62, who also admitted downloading child sex abuse images, was told by a sheriff the sentence was a direct alternative to prison.

Deans joined the board of Falkirk FC in 2019 and announced his resignation as chairman in December 2021 citing “personal and family reasons”.

Stirling Sheriff Court heard that Deans’ then-home in Brightons, Falkirk was raided by police armed with a search warrant at 7.50am on February 10, 2023.

Officers found multiple electronic devices and Deans revealed their passwords.

On an external hard drive connected to a laptop, forensic examination revealed 45 still images and 15 video files of extreme content with creation dates between February and May 2022.

Prosecutor Ronnie Hay told the court that the “extreme pornography” depicted sexual activity between a man and a dog.

“Police confirmed that the dog was similar to Mr Deans’ dog at the time the search warrant was executed,” he said.

Officers also found 18 still images and six videos featuring child sexual exploitation, some of them of the most serious kind and featuring children as young as four.

Deans told detective constable Kieran Roberts: “I was in a chat room and someone sent me images. I deleted them and I never sent them on.”

Mr Hay, the depute fiscal, said that Deans later told police he had viewed the child sexual abuse material “after engaging in online sexual communication with an unknown female”.

Deans, now of Rumbling Bridge, Perthshire, a former chartered accountant with KPMG, pled guilty to possessing extreme porn and downloading child abuse material.

Solicitor Kelly Howe, defending, said Deans was a first offender and had voluntarily taken steps to address his offending by taking a course with the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, set up to tackle child sex abuse.

Ms Howe said: “What’s obvious is that Mr Deans has shown a genuine degree of recognition and remorse.”

Sheriff Keith O’Mahony told Deans: “The category of the indecent images of children fully passes the normal custodial threshold.

“You pled guilty not just to having indecent images of children, but also extreme images, so there’s an aggravating feature to consider.

“There are a number of mitigating features. You have shown remorse, you have taken positive steps towards rehabilitation and to address your offending behaviour – and you otherwise appear to have a positive character and previous exemplary conduct.

“On balance, I have reached the conclusion that I can deal with this by a non-custodial disposal.

“If you breach this order, you’ll be very lucky to avoid imprisonment.”

Outside court, Deans said he did not want to make any comment.