The Court of Appeal has rejected Alicia Edosa’s appeal against conviction and increased the sentences imposed on her and Edith Enoghaghase after finding them unduly lenient in Ireland’s first human trafficking case to reach the courts.
The court quashed the trafficking sentences imposed by the Circuit Court and resentenced Edosa to seven and a half years’ imprisonment and Enoghaghase to seven years and one month. It imposed matching sentences for organising prostitution. All sentences are concurrent and date from the dates set by the Circuit Court. The money laundering sentences were left unchanged.
Edosa had appealed her convictions, pursuing at the appeal hearing only a ground concerning missing phone evidence. Her lawyers argued that a complainant had destroyed evidence and that Gardaí had failed to investigate phone records further. The Court of Appeal upheld the trial judge’s decision not to stop the trial. It said the suggestion that deleted or destroyed material would have helped Edosa was speculation, and found no evidence that the phones should have alerted Gardaí to the need for further investigation.
The Director of Public Prosecutions sought reviews of both women’s sentences on grounds of undue leniency. Enoghaghase had appealed the severity of her sentence, having withdrawn her appeal against conviction. The Court of Appeal dismissed that appeal following its finding of undue leniency.
The women were convicted after a 25-day trial of trafficking offences involving four women from Nigeria, organising prostitution and money laundering. The court’s account of the trial evidence described the complainants as having been deceived about work in Ireland, subjected to oath-taking rituals in Nigeria and then forced into prostitution under threats and control. The convictions included two trafficking counts and one prostitution count for each respondent; Edosa was convicted of 34 money laundering counts and Enoghaghase of four.
The sentencing judge had set an eight-year headline sentence for the trafficking counts before mitigation, then imposed effective sentences of five years and eight months for Edosa and five years and one month for Enoghaghase. The Court of Appeal said a headline sentence below ten years was an error in this case. It concluded that the sentences imposed were a substantial departure from the appropriate sentences and therefore unduly lenient. It acknowledged that the sentencing judge had faced a new offence without local comparators or appellate guidance, and said its disagreement was not criticism of him.
The appeal court set a ten-year headline sentence, then reduced it to reflect the women’s lack of previous convictions and difficult backgrounds. It retained a five-month difference between their trafficking sentences, as the trial judge had done. It also said the other offences were inextricably linked and should be sentenced concurrently.