The Court of Appeal dismissed Michael Lynch’s appeal against his conviction for assault causing harm and allowed the Director of Public Prosecutions’ application to review his sentence as unduly lenient. It resentenced Lynch to five years’ imprisonment, suspending the final 12 months on condition that he enter a €100 bond to keep the peace and be of good behaviour for 12 months after release.
Lynch had been convicted by a jury at Cork Circuit Criminal Court on 1 June 2016 of assault causing harm under section 3 of the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997. He was acquitted of a separate charge of making a threat to kill. The trial court sentenced him to two years and six months in prison on 7 June 2016.
The appeal concerned evidence that three people had declined to give statements to gardaí, the trial judge’s summary of the defence case, and comments to the jury about the burden of proof. The Court of Appeal rejected each ground. It held that the evidence about the declined statements was admissible, found no unfairness in the jury directions, and concluded that the trial judge’s clear instruction on proof beyond reasonable doubt was not undermined by a later comment about the consequences of convicting an innocent person or acquitting someone guilty on the evidence.
The court also reviewed the circumstances of the assault described in the judgment. On 21 July 2015, while Lynch and the complainant, Tara Byrd, were living together at an address on Old Youghal Road in Cork, he poured boiling water with sugar added onto her left leg. Byrd was four and a half months pregnant. She suffered third-degree burns, spent about ten days in hospital, underwent skin-graft surgery and was left with severe scarring. The judgment said she initially told several people that she had spilled the water herself, but told her father about four days later that Lynch was responsible.
In considering sentence, the appeal court said the offence was premeditated and exceptionally serious, and that adding sugar to the water placed its gravity at the highest level. It set the headline sentence at the statutory maximum of five years. The court considered Lynch’s difficult personal circumstances and young age as mitigation, while stating that a previous conviction could not itself be a mitigating factor. It suspended the final year of the sentence on the stated bond and good-behaviour conditions.