The Court of Appeal has dismissed Sean Garvey’s appeal against the severity of a seven-year prison sentence, with the final two years suspended, for sexual assault. It said the sentence was within the range available to the sentencing judge and identified no error of principle.
The sentence was imposed by Cork Circuit Criminal Court on 1 June 2017 after a four-day trial that resulted in a conviction. Garvey had appealed both his conviction and sentence. A differently constituted Court of Appeal had already dismissed his conviction appeal; the present judgment dealt with sentence severity only.
The court said the offence occurred on 6 February 2016, when a 10-year-old girl was staying overnight at a friend’s house. Garvey was in the house as the boyfriend of the host child’s mother. The judgment recounts that the girl woke at about 3am as he lifted her from bed. After she went to the toilet, he tried to follow her. She was then taken downstairs and sexually assaulted. The assault ended after she kicked him, ran upstairs and told her friend’s mother.
At the sentence hearing, the trial judge placed the offence in the upper mid-range. The judge treated the absence of relevant previous convictions as the only real mitigating factor. Garvey had older convictions under road traffic and public order legislation, but the judge did not regard him as having an entirely clear record; rather, he had no relevant previous convictions.
The appeal court noted the girl’s age, the sleepover setting and the sequence of events as aggravating circumstances. It also referred to the victim impact statement from the girl’s mother, which described significant effects on the girl and her wider family.
The court said the contested trial meant Garvey did not receive the substantial mitigation that a guilty plea could have provided. It acknowledged that the sentence was significant, but concluded it did not fall outside the available range. The appeal against sentence was dismissed.