I’m only low risk says killer, kidnapper and rapist Michael Sams

Sams, who only has one leg, achieved notoriety in the early 1990s after killing Julie Dart, 18, then kidnapping Birmingham estate agent Stephanie Slater, 25, who was held captive in a wheelie bin while he negotiated a large cash ransom.

Despite his disability, Sams was able to pluck the cash from under the noses of police on a foggy night in Oxspring, South Yorkshire, and although he freed Miss Slater he was eventually traced and was convicted in 1993.

Yesterday he told Mr Justice Ouseley, during a High Court hearing in London, how the level of risk he posed to women prison staff had fallen over the past 15 years.

Sams is trying to force authorities to re-categorise his prisoner status and said: “In 1995, 1997 I was an extreme danger to female staff. In 2005, I was only medium risk. Now I am only low risk.”

He took legal action against Justice Secretary Ken Clarke as part of a fight to be downgraded from category A.

Sams, a former toolmaker from Sutton-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, complained that prison bosses had refused to remove “inaccurate” information from his files.

But Mr Justice Ouseley dismissed his claim for “judicial review” saying prison officials had made “time-consuming and painstaking efforts” to ensure Sams’s file contained “all that it ought to”.

The judge was told that prison authorities had considered Sams’s case in 2009, 2010 and 2011 and concluded each time that he should be classed category A.

Sams represented himself and appeared by video link from Whitemoor prison near March, Cambridgeshire, where he is held.

He presented a hand-written statement of claim to the court, writing in capital letters and referring to himself in the third person.