The Court of Appeal has rejected the Director of Public Prosecutions’ application to review as unduly lenient a fully suspended four-year sentence imposed on Stephen O’Connor for three firearm offences.
O’Connor was sentenced in the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court on 10 May 2021 after pleading guilty to three counts of possessing a firearm in suspicious circumstances. The sentencing judge set a headline sentence of seven years, reduced it to four years and suspended the full term.
The Director did not challenge the seven-year headline sentence or dispute that mitigation justified departing from the mandatory presumptive minimum. The appeal focused on whether the circumstances justified suspending the entire sentence.
The offences arose from a search on 7 September 2019. Gardaí found two semiautomatic pistols, each with 15 live rounds, in a sports bag concealed inside a hoover in a van parked behind O’Connor’s home in Donaghmede. The Court of Appeal described the offending as extremely serious and said an immediate custodial sentence would not have been inappropriate.
At the sentencing hearing, the court heard that O’Connor had no previous convictions, had cooperated with Gardaí and entered an early plea. An investigating Garda accepted that he was vulnerable and may have been influenced from outside. Reports from a consultant psychiatrist, a psychologist and probation were also before the sentencing judge.
The psychiatric evidence described a long history of serious mental illness and repeated suicide attempts, including attempts in 2004 and 2019. The judgment also records that two of O’Connor’s brothers died by suicide. The psychiatrist reported that O’Connor’s mood had stabilised after changes to his medication, while noting a risk of recurrence.
The Court of Appeal said other judges might have decided that a custodial sentence was necessary. But it said it could intervene only if there was an error in principle; it was not enough that the appeal judges might have taken a different approach. It concluded that the evidence, particularly the documented suicide attempts and family history, placed the case in a “very exceptional category”.
The court held that the sentencing judge’s decision to suspend the sentence in full was available to her and that she had not erred in finding wholly exceptional circumstances. It therefore refused the Director’s application. The four-year sentence remains fully suspended.