The Court of Criminal Appeal restructured Michael Farrell’s 20-year sentence for sexual offences against three sisters, while leaving the overall term unchanged. In a judgment delivered on 1 July 2010, the court dismissed his appeal against the severity of the sentence in substance but varied several individual terms and how they ran.
Farrell had been convicted after trial in December 2003 on 31 counts involving rape and indecent assault. The offences concerned three sisters, identified in the judgment as C., M. and E. He was acquitted on a small number of other counts, including counts relating to another alleged victim. His separate appeal against conviction had already been dismissed in July 2009.
The sentencing judge imposed consecutive terms for offences against the different sisters, producing a total of 20 years. On appeal, Farrell’s counsel accepted that consecutive sentences were appropriate and that the individual terms were unobjectionable, but argued that the combined sentence was excessive and breached the totality principle.
The appeal court said consecutive sentences may be appropriate for serious offences against different people over an extended period, while stressing that a sentencing court must consider the overall impact of combined terms. It concluded that the sentencing judge had taken that principle into account and that 20 years was not excessive in the circumstances.
The court nevertheless adjusted the sentence structure. It increased the concurrent terms for the rape counts concerning M. from eight to 10 years. It affirmed the eight-year term for the rape of E., to run consecutively after the term for M., and kept the related two-year indecent-assault terms concurrent. For C., it reduced the term on count 33 from four to two years, consecutive after the term for E.; it set two years for counts 25 to 32, concurrent with count 33. The court said this reflected the maximum available under the earlier 1935 law for those offences and consistency with other indecent-assault terms.
The revised terms still total 20 years’ imprisonment. The court said the changes were not intended to diminish the significance of the offences against C. or to indicate what sentence would have been appropriate if those offences had stood alone.