The Court of Appeal has reduced a six-year prison sentence to three years for a man convicted of sexually assaulting two seven-year-old girls who visited his home for play dates with his daughter.
The appellant, identified only as A.L., pleaded guilty in the Circuit Court to one count of sexual assault relating to both children. The offending occurred in 2007 or 2008.
The judgment records that the girls would visit A.L.’s home and spend time in a basement. He showed them adult pornographic magazines and encouraged them to remove clothing as part of what he described as games. This happened on several occasions.
A.L. also admitted placing the children over his shoulders and smacking their bare bottoms. Those acts formed the physical basis of the sexual assault charge. On another occasion, one child was asked to use a magnifying glass to touch his penis.
The DPP had described the offence as lying at the upper end of the lower range of seriousness. The Court of Appeal agreed that the physical acts themselves were towards the lower end, but stressed serious surrounding factors. The girls were extremely young, the conduct involved repeated indecency, and there was a clear breach of trust because they were visiting a schoolfriend’s home. Victim impact reports recorded significant consequences for both children and their families.
A.L. had no previous convictions. The case had also produced major consequences for him, including loss of employment, relocation after two arson attacks on his home, supervised access to his own children and an attempted suicide. His guilty plea was not early, but it spared the girls from having to give evidence.
The appeal court nevertheless found the six-year term to be a significant departure from sentencing norms for comparable offending and therefore an error of principle.
It substituted three years' imprisonment, backdated to the original sentencing date, together with two years of post-release supervision. A.L. remains subject to sex-offender registration and must comply with Probation Service requirements after release.