The Court of Appeal dismissed Janis Zarans’s appeal against four sentences imposed by Longford Circuit Criminal Court, despite finding an error in how the court accounted for mitigation on the unlawful seizure offence. It concluded that resentencing would produce a sentence requiring him to serve about the same time in prison.
Zarans had pleaded guilty in May 2015 to unlawful seizure of a vehicle, false imprisonment, reckless endangerment and dangerous driving. In October 2015, he received concurrent sentences of 10 years, with the final year suspended, seven years, four years and three months respectively. He was also disqualified from driving for 15 years. The appeal challenged the severity of the sentences.
The Court of Appeal heard that Zarans was one of two men involved in the planned abduction of Sabrina Cence from a car park in Longford in October 2014. The men threatened her with knives, took her car and demanded money. After Gardaí saw the abduction on a live CCTV feed, they pursued the car. The court heard that Zarans rammed a Garda vehicle and drove at speed against oncoming traffic before crashing. Cence suffered injuries, including a confirmed fracture of a vertebra, and described lasting physical and psychological effects in a victim impact statement. Her car was written off, but insurance reimbursed her for it.
The appeal court said the sentencing judge had assessed the unlawful seizure offence at a headline sentence of 10 years and suspended the final year to reflect mitigation. That mitigation included the guilty plea, previous good character, cooperation, genuine remorse and the added hardship of imprisonment for a foreign national with limited English and little family in Ireland. The appeal court held that an effective 10% discount was insufficient and amounted to an error of principle.
However, the court said it would independently set a 12-year headline sentence for the offence, then apply a mitigation discount of about 25%. That would leave a sentence very close to the one already imposed, with nine years to be served at this point. As the outcome would not be materially altered, it declined to quash or replace the sentence.
The court also found some substance in the complaint that the sentencing judge’s reasoning for the other three sentences was unclear. It considered the false imprisonment sentence of seven years “very lenient indeed,” noting that the judge had apparently been told the maximum was 10 years when it was in fact life imprisonment. But the Director of Public Prosecutions had not appealed on undue leniency, and the court said it would not increase the sentence in Zarans’s appeal. It found no basis to interfere with the remaining sentences and dismissed the appeal.