The High Court refused to direct an inquiry into the lawfulness of a prisoner’s detention at Castlerea Prison, rejecting his written application for habeas corpus under Article 40.4.2 of the Constitution.
In a judgment delivered on 9 June 2016, Ms Justice Stewart said the applicant had not shown a substantive infringement of his constitutional rights. The court concluded that his application rested on a technicality and refused to direct an inquiry. The judgment does not order his release.
The applicant was serving consecutive sentences: part of a sentence imposed for three offences under the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997, and a reduced sentence for a later theft and fraud offence. The final two and a half years of the original five-year sentence had been suspended. Eighteen months were reactivated in July 2015 after a breach of conditions. The six-month sentence for the later offence was reduced to three months on appeal.
The applicant argued that his circumstances were similar to those of two applicants in Moore v DPP, a 2016 High Court case in which provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 2006 were found unconstitutional. He said his suspended sentence was reactivated four days before proceedings on the later offence concluded and before his partially successful appeal, and that this breached his constitutional rights.
Justice Stewart said the Moore ruling concerned circumstances in which the applicants’ ability to appeal had been impeded, exposing them to detention without due process. In this case, the applicant’s appeal process had concluded and his conviction for the second offence had been affirmed. The court also considered Clarke v Governor of Mountjoy Prison, which held that substantive similarities to Moore were needed for an applicant to benefit from that ruling; each case must still be assessed on its own merits.
The judge said the court had not been given information about the plea entered in the later trial, the grounds of appeal, or any substantive effort to challenge section 99 of the 2006 Act. Without that information, it could not assess whether the applicant’s conduct barred him from relying on the ruling. The judgment said more detailed submissions about his circumstances would be required to meet the requirements discussed in Clarke.