The Court of Appeal has reduced the sentences imposed on Barry Watters for public indecency offences in Dublin and possession of child pornography, substituting an aggregate sentence of five years and eight months, with the final 18 months suspended.
The appeal concerned sentence severity. The court quashed the Circuit Court sentences and imposed new terms: 12 months for the first public indecency offence, 20 months for the second, and four years for possessing child pornography. The two public indecency sentences are concurrent, while the image offence sentence is consecutive. The suspended portion remains subject to the conditions set by the Circuit Court.
The public indecency offences took place on 1 and 2 December 2014 in the Francis Street area of Dublin. The judgment describes children encountering Watters with his penis exposed. In one incident, a 10-year-old girl said he put his penis on her arm, but she was unsure whether this was intentional or accidental. Watters pleaded guilty after the charges were substituted following a constitutional issue concerning the original charges; both sides accepted that the plea should be treated as early.
The image offence came to light in October 2016, when gardaí followed Watters into an internet café on Middle Abbey Street. A USB stick he produced contained about 422 images, 23 of which the judgment identified as concerning: 17 depicted children engaged in sexual activity and six showed children’s genitals exposed.
The Court of Appeal said the public indecency offending was very serious, but found that the maximum sentence imposed for it was inappropriate. It also held that the maximum starting point for the image offence was not appropriate, even given Watters’s directly relevant previous convictions. The court selected a four-year sentence and suspended 18 months.
The judgment records previous convictions for similar image offences and earlier suspended terms that were activated after breaches of conditions. The court acknowledged that previous efforts to encourage and incentivise Watters through partly suspended sentences had failed. It nevertheless concluded that the detailed conditions, informed by psychological and probation reports, offered some grounds for hope of structure and supervision. It warned that further offending was likely to lead to the same result as before.