The Court of Appeal reduced Jeffrey Crowley’s cumulative prison sentence by one year after finding that the sentencing judge had failed to properly assess whether the total term was proportionate. The court dismissed the other grounds of his sentence appeal.
Crowley had pleaded guilty to offences across three indictments, involving six victims. The offences included assaults, thefts, criminal damage and endangerment. The sentencing judge imposed concurrent terms within each indictment but made the terms across the indictments consecutive, producing a total of nine years and three months, with the final 15 months suspended.
The appeal court said the sentencing judge was entitled to structure the sentences consecutively, including making one consecutive term follow another. Some consecutive sentencing was required because offences on two indictments had been committed while Crowley was on bail for offences on the first. But once the sentencing judge chose that structure, she had to stand back and rigorously assess whether the aggregate custodial term was proportionate.
The appeal court found an error in the sentencing judge’s reliance on the concern that reducing the total might do an injustice to an individual victim. It said the totality principle requires an overall sentence proportionate to the offending and the offender’s circumstances; applying it is not an additional allowance for mitigation. The court also considered that the additional consecutive terms exceeded the four-year sentence for the most serious offence, endangerment, without clear justification for that overall increase.
The court accepted that the case involved serious, repeated offending and that Crowley had a substantial previous record. It did not find the individual sentences inappropriate, and rejected the claims that the sentencing judge had given insufficient weight to mitigation, undue weight to aggravating factors or victim impact evidence, or had misjudged the endangerment sentence. It allowed the appeal only on the ground that the overall sentence was excessive and disproportionate.
On resentencing, the court retained the consecutive structure and the 15-month suspension, but reduced three terms: the assault causing harm sentence on the first indictment from two years and three months to two years; the assault causing harm sentence on the second from three years to two years and nine months; and the endangerment sentence on the third from four years to three years and six months. The revised cumulative term is eight years and three months, with the final 15 months suspended for the same period and on the same conditions imposed below.