The Court of Appeal dismissed Irmantas Paulauskas’s appeal against his convictions for robbery and possession of an imitation firearm, but reduced his robbery sentence from 14 to 12 years. It left unchanged the concurrent five-year sentence for the firearm offence.
A Galway Circuit Court jury convicted Paulauskas on 11 May 2016. The trial judge sentenced him the following day. The appeal court delivered its judgment on 2 November 2017.
The appeal against conviction focused on the trial judge’s warning to the jury about the risk of mistaken identification, known in the judgment as a Casey warning. Paulauskas also challenged the verdict as perverse and contrary to the evidence, but that ground was not argued at the appeal hearing.
The prosecution case was that four men robbed Hartmanns Jewellers on William Street in Galway on 11 February 2015, taking diamond rings and Rolex watches worth about €1.139 million. Two civilian witnesses followed the men from the shop, although both accepted there had been brief periods when the men were out of sight. The defence emphasised the lack of DNA or other forensic evidence and the case’s reliance on visual identification.
The Court of Appeal held that the trial judge’s identification warning was adequate in the circumstances. It described the case as one of “caught-in-the-act” or “hot pursuit”, rather than a classic identification case, and said the prosecution case was particularly strong. The court was satisfied that the convictions were safe and proper and dismissed the conviction appeal.
On sentence, the appeal court said the robbery was planned and very serious, and noted Paulauskas’s significant criminal record. It also considered that the weapons used were realistic imitations rather than actual loaded firearms, and that a distinction in seriousness was appropriate. The court set a 13-year starting point for the robbery sentence, then applied a reduction, resulting in a 12-year term. The five-year sentence for possessing an imitation firearm remained concurrent and unchanged.