The Court of Criminal Appeal allowed the Director of Public Prosecutions’ application to review as unduly lenient a four-year, nine-month sentence for manslaughter, then substituted a 10-year prison term with three years suspended.
The court delivered its substantive ruling on 31 July 2007 and adjourned the final sentence decision to hear further submissions. On 17 December 2007, it imposed the substituted sentence, backdated to the same date as the original term. The judgment gives that original date as 23 May 2005, the date of the respondent’s arrest. The respondent was to remain detained under the original warrant pending the final order.
The respondent had been tried for murder after fatally stabbing Robertas Stravinsks, a Latvian national, three times with a kitchen knife at the respondent’s Dublin flat on 23 May 2005. The jury acquitted him of murder and convicted him of manslaughter after accepting provocation. The fatal wound damaged an artery and pierced a lung. The judgment says the victim was seated, unarmed and intoxicated, and that there was no physical aggression by him.
In allowing the application, the court said the manslaughter fell in the upper part of the middle range of gravity. It described the attack as gross violence with a knife and said the original sentence fell well below the appropriate range. The court accepted that the trial judge had identified the relevant aggravating and mitigating factors, but concluded that the sentence gave insufficient weight to the offence’s gravity or too much weight to mitigation.
Mitigating matters included the respondent’s early offer to plead guilty to manslaughter, cooperation with Gardaí, remorse, good character and lack of previous convictions. The court also took account of the spontaneous nature of the offence, alcohol, and the additional burden of imprisonment in a foreign environment. It said the respondent’s effort to stem the bleeding was limited as mitigation because he did not seek medical help, despite the victim remaining alive for a period after the stabbing.
In its December decision, the court described the provocation as low-level verbal abuse without an overt threat of violence. It said the knife had been available at the scene and was not brought there for use, removing one aggravating factor. After considering further material, including a probation report and correspondence about the respondent’s conduct in prison, it fixed the sentence at 10 years, suspended three years on the usual good-behaviour and law-abiding terms.