I believe we will be appealing but at this moment in time I am just in shock.
“I just don’t know how he will cope with this sentence. It is the worst possible news.”
His mom had previously described how he was covered in sores, pale and pitifully thin and crippled by tooth decay.
The former squaddie now faces sharing a cramped, furnace-hot cell – designed to accommodate 20 people – with 78 other other prisoners. He has already witnessed two stabbings and an attempted rape.
A cellmate has also had his ear bitten off in a brutal attack.
His father Russ, originally from Northfield, runs a restaurant in Pattaya, near Bangkok.
Whitmore, who found work in Thailand with Petroleum Oil Services, was snared in a Pattaya supermarket only yards from his dad’s restaurant.
Whitmore had returned to Thailand in March, 2014, following the death of his 25-year-old fiance Jitma Tahin, known as Tree, from meningitis. He had lived there, off and on for five years.
Lance’s mum Debbie Caswell, 51 said: ‘He has done wrong, but there is a reason he got mixed up in all that, everything that was going on.’
His family, who have spent thousands on legal fees and are now asking for donations to fund their appeal against Lance’s sentence, claim that evidence used in Lance’s trial had been tampered with and that he has been denied his basic human rights.