The Court of Appeal increased Simon Gentles’s sentence for a violent home invasion, finding that the original sentence involved a substantial departure from the appropriate sentence. It replaced the four-year term with a six-year custodial sentence after allowing for mitigation, including evidence of rehabilitation in prison.
Gentles pleaded guilty on 18 October 2011 at Ennis Circuit Criminal Court to an offence under section 13 of the Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act 2001. He was sentenced to four years in prison, consecutive to a term he was already serving. The Director of Public Prosecutions applied under section 2 of the Criminal Justice Act 1993 for a review on grounds of undue leniency.
The Court of Appeal said the offence took place on 7 January 2010 at Sixmilebridge, Co Clare. The judgment said Gentles, acting as part of a gang, forced his way into a home while accomplices remained outside. Wearing a balaclava and carrying a loaded sawn-off shotgun, he threatened a woman and her 14-year-old son, demanding to know where a safe was. He threatened to shoot the woman, prodded her with the gun and pointed it towards the boy’s head. The court described the ordeal as traumatic and extremely frightening.
The judgment recorded that Gentles had 82 previous convictions, including assault, car theft, road traffic and public order offences. He was 25 at the time of the offence and 29 when the judgment was delivered. The sentencing judge had identified aggravating factors, including the gun, the remote location and Gentles’s record, and considered seven years appropriate before mitigation. The four-year sentence reflected mitigating factors, including his guilty plea.
The Court of Appeal applied the test for an undue-leniency review: intervention required a substantial or gross departure from the appropriate sentence, amounting to an error of principle. It concluded that the sentencing judge had erred by assessing the pre-mitigation tariff at seven years. In the appeal court’s view, the appropriate tariff was 10 to 12 years; a reduction of two to three years for the guilty plea and other factors would produce a seven-year custodial sentence.
The court then considered courses Gentles had taken in prison and a testimonial from his partner describing his efforts to rehabilitate. It reduced the seven-year term by a further year and imposed a six-year sentence. The judgment does not state whether the new term was to run consecutively to the term Gentles was already serving.