Appeal court reserves judgment on teenager’s sentence for rape and sexual assaults

This report is a localnews.ie summary based on public court reporting and records; sources are listed below.

The Court of Appeal reserved judgment on a teenager’s appeal against his sentence for raping and sexually assaulting his seven-year-old cousin. The proceedings were reported on 8 June 2023.

A jury found him guilty of rape, which he had denied. He pleaded guilty to four counts of sexual assault.

The rape occurred between 1 October and 31 December 2018, when he was 13. In February 2023, Ms Justice Karen O’Connor sentenced him at the Central Criminal Court to one year’s detention for rape and nine months’ detention on each sexual assault count, with all sentences running concurrently. She also ordered two years of post-release supervision.

At the appeal hearing on 8 June, Lorcan Staines SC, for the teenager, asked the court to quash the sentence. He argued that the sentencing judge had wrongly believed she lacked authority to impose a non-custodial sentence on a child. He said his client, now over 18, faced serving the final 31 days after remission in an adult prison.

John William Fennelly BL, for the State, said those 31 days were neither an error of principle nor excessive given the nature of the offences. He said there had been no guilty plea to oral rape and that the appellant did not accept the jury verdict. Mr Justice John Edwards said the court would reserve judgment.