The High Court ruled that a three-month prison sentence imposed on Mariana Kovacs could not support her detention because the District Court had convicted and sentenced her for theft without first putting her on her right to elect trial by jury. However, the court refused to set aside a separate one-month sentence, which it held could begin immediately.
Ms Justice Baker delivered the judgment on 30 June 2015 in an inquiry into the lawfulness of Ms Kovacs’s detention under two warrants. The Governor of Mountjoy Women’s Prison and the Dochas Centre accepted that she had not been put on her election before pleading guilty to a theft offence at Dun Laoghaire District Court on 13 January 2014. She received a three-month sentence, suspended for two years.
During the suspension period, she was convicted of another theft offence at Blanchardstown District Court and sentenced on 15 September 2014 to one month in prison, to be served after the first sentence. In December 2014, the first sentence was activated in full. Ms Kovacs appealed the activation and the second conviction and sentence, but the Circuit Court affirmed the District Court decisions in June 2015.
The respondents argued that Ms Kovacs had waited too long to challenge the first conviction and had acquiesced in it by pleading guilty and relying on the suspended sentence. The judge rejected that argument. She found the evidence indicated that Ms Kovacs had not been informed of her right to elect, and said knowledge of the defect could not confer jurisdiction on the District Court. Since the right of election was a necessary precondition to the court’s jurisdiction, the first conviction and sentence were void and could not support detention under the first warrant.
The judge separately considered whether the one-month sentence could stand when its warrant said it was to begin on the “legal expiration” of the first sentence. She concluded that the wording was sufficiently clear. Her determination that the first sentence was invalid meant its detention period had legally ended, so the second sentence could be served immediately. The inquiry did not itself quash the first warrant as a judicial review order would, but the judge held that it could no longer justify detention.
The court therefore found the first warrant could not lawfully support Ms Kovacs’s detention and refused relief in respect of the second warrant.