The High Court ruled that the Minister for Justice was not barred from considering David Kavanagh for temporary release because the final three years of his 10-year prison sentence had been suspended. The court granted his application for judicial review, challenging a decision made in or around April 2013 not to consider him for release from Mountjoy Prison’s training unit.
Mr Justice Michael White said the case turned on how the Misuse of Drugs Act 1977 treated the minimum prison term for a section 15A offence. The judgment, delivered on 5 September 2013, said the sentencing judge had not specified whether the sentence was imposed under the statutory provision setting a minimum 10-year term or the provision allowing an exception in exceptional and specific circumstances.
Kavanagh had been convicted by a jury in February 2008 on three cannabis-possession counts. The sentencing judge imposed 10 years’ imprisonment, backdated to 29 February 2008, with the final three years suspended for three years. The committal order required him to enter a €150 bond and keep the peace and be of good behaviour during the suspension period.
In April 2013, Kavanagh’s solicitors asked why he had not been considered for temporary release. The Irish Prison Service replied that the Minister was prohibited from granting release to people serving 10-year sentences for section 15A offences, including sentences with part suspended. The judgment said the Minister appeared to rely on a statutory restriction on release where an enactment prohibited it.
The court read the temporary-release provision alongside the restriction on commutation or remission. It noted that a suspended sentence is not automatically activated: a person must serve the suspended part only if a court later revokes the suspension. On the ordinary meaning of a 10-year sentence with the final three years suspended, the court said, seven years were to be served.
Because the sentencing judge had not specified which statutory subsection applied, the High Court held that a valid interpretation was that the sentence fell under the exceptional-circumstances provision. On that interpretation, the Minister’s discretion over temporary release was not restricted by the section 15A provision, though it remained subject to the Temporary Release of Prisoners Act 2003. The judgment did not itself grant temporary release; it held that Kavanagh was entitled to an order in his favour on the judicial review application.