The Court of Criminal Appeal ruled that section 11 of the Criminal Justice Act 1984 does not require every sentence for offences committed while an offender is on bail to run consecutively to every other such sentence. It reduced Abdulakim Yusuf’s total prison term from 11 years to nine.
Yusuf appealed the sentence imposed by the Circuit Criminal Court in Cork on 27 June 2007 for five heroin offences committed in Cork between 23 September 2006 and 4 January 2007. He had been in custody since 4 January 2007.
The Circuit Court imposed a three-year term for the first offence, concurrent with a one-year term for the second. For the third offence, committed five days after Yusuf was granted bail in relation to the second matter, it imposed two years consecutive to the first sentence. It imposed three years consecutive to that term for the fourth offence and a further three years consecutive to the fourth sentence for the fifth. The resulting total was 11 years.
For the applicant, counsel argued that section 11 did not mandate cumulative consecutive sentences. The Director of Public Prosecutions’ counsel argued that the provision required a sentence to attach to the previous sentence last due to expire, and that the court could impose cumulative consecutive terms. The DPP’s counsel also argued that the earlier Court of Criminal Appeal decision in *The People v Cole* did not settle the issue.
The court said section 11 was ambiguous and could permit more than one consecutive sentence, provided the totality principle was respected. But it did not require every sentence for an offence committed on bail to run consecutively to every other similar sentence; the last sentence was to be consecutive to the relevant earlier sentence or sentences. It also said consecutive sentences did not require statutory authorisation as a general feature of Irish criminal law.
Applying that interpretation, the court found that making the sentences for the final three sets of offences consecutive to each other produced a disproportionately high total, given the relatively small quantities of drugs involved. It directed that the sentence for offence C run concurrently with the sentences for offences A and B, while the sentences for offences D and E remain cumulatively consecutive to the three-year sentence for offence A. The resulting total term was nine years. The judgment does not state a revised commencement date for that total term.