The High Court ordered the release of a man held in Mountjoy Prison after finding that his warrants did not establish with certainty when his prison sentences began. The ruling did not decide whether the warrants had also become stale.
The man had been convicted by a jury in his absence on 14 counts and sentenced on 14 March 2002. The trial judge ordered prison terms of nine years on two counts, six years on two others, and three years on three counts, with the remaining counts taken into consideration. The warrant said the sentences were to begin “from the date of the arrest and imprisonment of the accused”.
In December 2004, the man applied to the High Court for an inquiry into the lawfulness of his detention under Article 40.4 of the Constitution. The court had ordered his release in an oral ruling on 22 December. In this written judgment, Mr Justice Michael Peart said further consideration had led him to uphold that conclusion on a different ground from the one he had mainly relied on in the oral ruling.
The warrants recorded two arrests: the applicant was arrested in Northern Ireland on 15 June 2004 and was arrested and lodged in Mountjoy on 2 July. The judge said it was unclear which date started the sentences. Neither the warrants nor the court record resolved the ambiguity. He found it was a genuine uncertainty about the duration of imprisonment, serious enough to make the detention unlawful.
The applicant also argued that the warrants did not authorise the prison governor to detain him and that the sentences were uncertain because the judge had not said whether they ran concurrently or consecutively. The court rejected both arguments. It held that a warrant directing Gardaí to arrest the applicant and lodge him in Mountjoy gave the governor sufficient authority to detain him. It also held that, under the cited authorities, sentences not expressed to be consecutive are treated as concurrent.
The judgment noted that the applicant’s absence from trial and sentencing could raise questions, but left that issue undecided because the circumstances were not established. It also raised, without deciding, whether the warrants dated 14 October 2002 had become stale by the time they were executed in 2004. The release order rested on the uncertainty over the sentence commencement date.