The High Court refused relief to Maria Muntean in a judicial review concerning her bid to challenge a District Court theft conviction before she was sentenced.
Mr Justice McCarthy held that an application to state a case on a point of law could not be made until the criminal proceedings were concluded by sentence. He said the District Court judge had jurisdiction, and a duty, to remand Muntean to the court that had imposed her suspended sentence.
Muntean was convicted on 20 February 2009 of theft under section 4 of the Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act 2001. On 27 February, her representatives lodged an application asking the District Court judge to state a case about the conviction. The judge refused, taking the view that he had no jurisdiction to do so before sentence.
The sentence for the theft conviction had been adjourned to 30 March 2009. Under section 99 of the Criminal Justice Act 2006, as amended, the judge remanded Muntean on bail to the next sitting of the court that had imposed the earlier suspended sentence, listed for 4 March. That court could then consider whether the suspension should be revisited.
Muntean argued that the conviction could be appealed before sentence, and that preventing an appeal at that stage risked undermining her constitutional rights and natural justice. Her counsel also argued that the application to state a case should operate as a stay on the remand. The judge rejected those arguments.
He interpreted the statutory provisions for a case stated appeal as requiring a matter to have been “heard and determined”, which he said imports finality. In his view, the proceedings were not concluded until sentence. He also concluded that an appeal from the District Court to the Circuit Court could not be confined to conviction alone under the applicable provisions.
The judgment distinguished earlier High Court decisions that had supported appeals after conviction but before sentence, reasoning that relevant statutory provisions and a Supreme Court decision had not been brought to those judges’ attention. Because no appeal lay before sentence, the purported application to state a case could not create a stay.
The court refused the relief sought. It did not decide whether Muntean’s conviction was correct; the judicial review concerned the judge’s jurisdiction to refuse the case stated application and to remand her under the suspended sentence legislation.