The Court of Appeal has dismissed Reece Lambert’s appeal against the severity of a three-year-and-two-month detention sentence for an assault committed when he was 16.
The ex tempore judgment, delivered on 28 March 2023, concerned a sentence imposed by the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court on 8 November 2021. Lambert had pleaded guilty to assault causing harm under section 3 of the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997. The prosecution accepted that plea; he had initially faced several other charges.
The assault happened on 2 January 2020 in the Thorndale Avenue area of Artane, County Dublin, during a fight involving groups of teenage boys. The court said the gathering involved about 25 youths, some carrying weapons. The injured party, Bartosz Bulanda, was knocked down and struck. Medical evidence described multiple injuries to both hands and significant injuries to his lip and nose. The tip of his right little finger was amputated, and he required surgery and casts on both hands. The court said the injuries and scarring were life-changing.
The case against Lambert was presented on a joint-enterprise basis. He was identified as a suspect, and Gardaí seized runners during a search of his home. A blood spot on them yielded a DNA profile matching Bulanda’s. The judgment also noted that footage of the injured party on the ground was posted on social media. Bulanda’s family later moved from Ireland to Poland.
At sentencing, the trial judge treated the offending as at the upper end of the section 3 range and identified five years as the headline sentence. After mitigation, she set a sentence of three years and 10 months, then reduced it by four months because Lambert had been a minor when the offence occurred. The judge believed Lambert had turned 18 by the sentencing date, but the Court of Appeal said his birthday was 18 November 2021, 10 days after sentence was imposed.
Lambert argued that his youth and maturity should have reduced the headline sentence and that his detention sentence was more severe than the sentence he would have received as an adult. The appeal court said the trial judge had been conscious of his youth and saw no substantive difference in this case between considering age at the headline-sentence stage or as mitigation. It also said the comparison with a proposed adult sentence could not ignore its suspended portion, which the court treated as a real penalty.
The Court of Appeal concluded that the sentence did not fall outside the available range for offending of this seriousness and identified no error in principle. It dismissed the appeal.