The Court of Criminal Appeal reduced a ten-year prison sentence imposed on Finn Colclough for manslaughter, suspending the final two years after finding that the sentencing judge may not have given proper consideration to his offer to plead guilty to manslaughter.
Colclough had been charged with murdering Séan Nolan, who was fatally stabbed on Waterloo Road, Dublin, on 26 May 2007. After a six-day trial, the jury found Colclough not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter. He appealed the sentence only.
The court said Colclough, who was 17 at the time, offered to plead guilty to manslaughter, but the prosecution did not accept the offer. The sentencing judge declined to treat it as a guilty plea, noting that the trial had also included issues of provocation and self-defence. The appeal court said it was unclear what consideration, if any, the offer had received. It held that it would be an error of principle if the offer was not considered, or if its value was reduced because those issues arose at trial after the offer was rejected.
In reaching its decision, the appeal court considered sentencing statistics discussed in an earlier case, DPP v Kelly. It said those figures offered limited assistance because the circumstances of the cases were not disclosed, but showed that a guilty plea merited consideration in sentencing. The court also referred to DPP v Mark Greene, where an unaccepted offer to plead guilty to manslaughter had been treated as a guilty plea after the accused was acquitted of murder and convicted of manslaughter.
The original sentencing judge had taken account of Colclough’s youth, lack of previous convictions and remorse, as well as psychiatric evidence and the effect of Nolan’s death on his family. A forensic psychiatrist described Colclough as having obsessive compulsive disorder and assessed him as a low risk of future violence.
The Court of Criminal Appeal granted leave to appeal and treated the application as the hearing of the appeal. It substituted a sentence of ten years with the final two years suspended, saying that sentence reflected the mitigating factors identified by the trial judge and the additional mitigation arising from Colclough’s offer to plead guilty.