The Court of Criminal Appeal ruled that it could consider a Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) application to review a sentence using the same type of material available in an appeal by a convicted person, even though the sentencing transcript was incomplete. The court said the sentencing judge’s report provided enough information to proceed with the review. The judgment does not state whether the DPP’s application succeeded or whether the sentence was changed.
The DPP had applied under section 2 of the Criminal Justice Act 1993 to review as unduly lenient the sentence imposed on Edward Anthony Farrell after he pleaded guilty to possessing heroin for supply and importing heroin. At Wexford Circuit Criminal Court on 6 November 2007, the sentencing judge imposed concurrent eight-year sentences on the two counts and suspended the final six years of each.
The prosecution’s evidence at sentencing put the heroin’s street value at €1.6 million. The DPP’s application argued that the sentencing judge gave excessive weight to mitigation and the guilty plea, and erred in suspending six years. Those were the DPP’s grounds, not findings made in this judgment about the sentence’s merits.
The Court of Criminal Appeal said the sentencing hearing transcript had significant gaps and inaccuracies, including missing parts of the prosecution evidence, some answers in cross-examination, a small portion of the evidence from Farrell’s mother, and parts of the sentencing judge’s remarks. With the parties’ consent, the case was placed before the appeal court for directions. The court asked the sentencing judge for a report, supplying the incomplete transcript as an aide mémoire. The judge provided a report that the appeal court described as complete and comprehensive.
Farrell’s counsel argued that there was no statutory or rules-based authority for obtaining a transcript or report in a DPP sentence review, and that the court could not use a manifestly incomplete transcript and a judge’s report in this way. The court accepted that section 2 did not spell out the procedure and that the relevant rules had not been expressly adapted for DPP reviews. It interpreted section 2 in the context of the Courts of Justice Act 1924, reading it as requiring the review to be heard and determined in the same manner as an appeal under section 33 of that Act.
The court concluded that, despite the fragmentary transcript, the sentencing judge’s report gave it sufficient information to carry out the review. The judgment ends at that procedural conclusion and does not record a decision on whether the sentence was unduly lenient.