The Court of Appeal set aside a fully suspended sentence imposed on Magnus Meyer Hustveit for rape and sexual assault and ordered him to serve 15 months in prison. The seven-year headline sentence remains, with all but 15 months suspended.
The decision followed a review application by the Director of Public Prosecutions under section 2 of the Criminal Justice Act 1993, alleging undue leniency. The DPP did not challenge the seven-year starting sentence or dispute that part of it could be suspended. The dispute was whether the whole sentence could be suspended.
The original sentence, imposed by the Central Criminal Court on 13 July 2015, comprised seven years’ imprisonment, suspended on terms, for rape and a concurrent two-year sentence, also suspended, for sexual assault. The Court of Appeal said the case involved repeated rapes and sexual assaults over about seven months. The extent of the offending became known through Hustveit’s admissions to the complainant and in an email exchange. The judgment described his cooperation with gardaí, guilty plea, lack of previous convictions and voluntary return from Norway for proceedings as significant mitigating circumstances.
The appeal court concluded that those circumstances justified a sentence appreciably below the norm for multiple rapes and assaults and allowed a significant portion to be suspended. But it found the case was not so exceptional as to justify a wholly non-custodial sentence, pointing to repeated offending and a further offence after the complainant had begun to discover what had happened. It set aside the original sentence and invited further submissions before resentencing.
At the resentencing stage, the court declined to receive an updated victim impact report because the defence had objected and would have had no opportunity to challenge it. It proceeded on the evidence before the sentencing court, which had established that the impact on the complainant was significant and expected to continue. The court also considered updated defence material and the respondent’s voluntary return to participate in the review. It said that return was particularly significant because, according to a Norwegian lawyer’s statement, Norway would not have extradited him as a Norwegian citizen.
The court said the original sentencing judge could not have required less than two and a half years of the sentence to be served. Taking account of the review-stage circumstances, the appeal court imposed half that period in custody: 15 months. It suspended the remainder of the seven-year sentence. The judgment does not state the terms of that suspension.