AJEALOUS husband who attacked his estranged wife after finding a text message from another man was jailed for 27 months yesterday.
John Herbert, 39, told his wife, Amanda, that when he married her his vows were "till death do us part" and added: "Don't make me kill you."
Herbert forced her to listen while he phoned a man and demanded to know if he had slept with her. The man told police that during the call he heard crying, screaming and choking noises coming from a woman in the background.
Herbert went into the kitchen saying he was going to get a knife and warned her: "No-one will ever look at you again."
He returned armed with a screwdriver and when he saw the phone was off the hook after a failed 999 emergency call, he brandished the weapon in front of her.
Advocate-depute Paul Kearney said: "She continued to scream until the accused threw the screwdriver across the living room and told her he loved her, worshipped the ground she walks on and when he married her his vows were 'till death do us part'."
Herbert, described as a prisoner in Perth, was originally charged with attempting to murder his victim. But he earlier pled guilty to a reduced charge of assaulting her to the danger of her life in June this year at a house in Shore Street, Buckhaven, in Fife, by repeatedly slapping and punching her, brandishing a screwdriver and compressing her throat and restricting her breathing.
The couple, who were married for 14 years and had three children, had been separated for 18 months.
Herbert also admitted punching her in the face in an earlier attack at her then home in Methil, in Fife, on June 18, 2004.
Lord McEwan told Herbert at the High Court in Edinburgh that the later charge was the more serious. The judge said he would have jailed him for three years for the assaults, but would reduce it because of his guilty pleas.
Defence counsel Ronnie Renucci said Herbert was a first offender. He asked the judge to take into account the background.
"Although it is not an excuse, it was within what had been a relationship and there was a degree, as he saw it, whether justified or not, of provocation because of the discovery of the texts, " he said.
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