Holyrood has inflicted more damage to the law since devolution than Westminster did in 300 years, a leading lawyer has claimed.
Alistair Bonnington, a solicitor advocate, said "huge damage" had been done to Scots law since the Scottish Parliament was established in 1999.
In a wide-ranging attack, he hit out at the ending of double jeopardy - a centuries-old tradition which prevented a person being tried twice for the same crime - as well as accusing MSPs of conducting a "sustained campaign" to erode legal aid.
Mr Bonnington, a former honorary professor of law at Glasgow University, also said he feared two "gold standards" of Scots law would soon be lost - the need for evidence to be backed up with corroboration and the ban on juries being told about an accused person's previous convictions.
A review of the law by Lord Carloway has already recommended doing away with the requirement for corroboration - with this having being accepted by the Scottish Government. Ministers are currently consulting on how best to implement Lord Carloway's recommendations.
Writing in the Times newspaper, Mr Bonnington said: "Sadly it is not going too far to say that Holyrood has done more harm to Scots law than Westminster managed in more than 300 years."
He hit out at the "sustained campaign by MSPs to erode legal aid to the point where lawyers will refuse to represent the impecunious accused in criminal cases".
Mr Bonnington argued Scotland now had "Soviet-style laws on double jeopardy", claiming the ban on trying someone for the same case twice had been ended in a bid to retry the World's End murder case after Angus Sinclair was cleared of killing Helen Scott and Christine Eadie in Edinburgh.
The lawyer went on: "These retrograde steps seem sure to be followed by the destruction of two of the gold standards of Scots criminal law: the need for corroboration of evidence and the prohibition against juries knowing prior convictions. Again, these are the kind of rules one expects to find in the third world."
Mr Bonnington went on to tell BBC Radio Scotland that the country had a "legal aid system which is collapsing". Speaking on the Good Morning Scotland programme, the lawyer said: "I last did a criminal trial in 1992. If I did one tomorrow, I would be paid less than the last one I did in 1992. You can't run a system like that."
