The Court of Appeal has dismissed W.M.’s appeal against the severity of his sentence, leaving in place concurrent 13-year prison terms for aggravated sexual assault and causing serious harm.
In an ex tempore judgment delivered on 3 July 2018, the court said the sentence was lenient but within the range open to the sentencing judge. It found no error of principle. The appeal was limited to sentence: a differently constituted Court of Appeal had upheld the convictions on all grounds on 15 May 2018.
A jury convicted W.M. in July 2013. The sentencing judge imposed both terms on 29 July 2013, backdated to 11 January 2012. The offences concerned an incident at an address in a small rural Irish village some days before 8 December 2011.
The judgment recounts evidence that the woman, then 33, suffered a severe vaginal injury and burns to her buttocks. A surgeon described a deep laceration extending into the abdominal cavity, with extensive infection. She spent 98 nights in St Luke’s Hospital; the judgment records that the HSE cost was €71,540. The woman’s victim impact statement described lasting physical and psychological effects.
At sentencing, the judge treated the serious-harm offence as reckless rather than intentional, taking the view more favourable to W.M. amid uncertainty over whether an object as well as a fist caused the injury. The judge cited the gravity of the offences and W.M.’s previous convictions, while also giving credit for his role in obtaining medical help and taking account of his age, then 70. The judge said those considerations justified a 13-year term rather than a longer sentence.
W.M. argued on appeal that the sentence was excessive and disproportionate. His counsel challenged the judge’s suggested starting point of 17 or 18 years and argued that recklessness reduced his moral culpability. The prosecution submitted that the case fell within an exceptional category warranting sentences of 12.5 years or more.
The Court of Appeal accepted the prosecution’s submission. It described the aggravated sexual assault as exceptionally grave and said the case fit within a category of offences for which sentences from 15 years to life had been imposed. The court considered that the sentencing judge could have started higher and called the four-year reduction for mitigation generous. It nevertheless dismissed the appeal, leaving the 13-year concurrent sentences in force.