The Court of Appeal has increased Lorcan Merriman’s sentence for impeding the apprehension of the person who murdered Thomas Farnan, quashing the sentence imposed by the Central Criminal Court and substituting six years’ imprisonment, with the final 18 months suspended under Probation Service supervision.
The sentence follows Merriman’s guilty plea, entered during his murder trial, to impeding the apprehension of an offender. The offence concerned disposal of the firearm used to shoot Farnan at his home in Kilcronan Close on 25 April 2016. Merriman was not convicted of Farnan’s murder in the source judgment; the appeal concerned only the sentence for impeding apprehension.
The Central Criminal Court had set an eight-year headline sentence, then reduced it to six years with 18 months suspended, citing the guilty plea, Merriman’s circumstances and rehabilitation efforts in prison. It ordered the sentence to follow a five-year firearms sentence imposed in 2018. The judge then applied the totality principle and reduced the term to four years with 18 months suspended.
The Director of Public Prosecutions appealed on grounds of undue leniency. The Director accepted that the six-year sentence with 18 months suspended was within the sentencing judge’s discretion, but argued that the further reduction was erroneous. The appeal court agreed. It said Merriman had already served the firearms sentence by the time of the sentence hearing, so the judge’s reason for reducing the sentence on totality grounds rested on a significant error. The court concluded that the reduction was unjustified and that the resulting sentence did not reflect the offence’s seriousness.
The appeal court substituted the six-year term with 18 months suspended and backdated its commencement to 26 December 2021, the date identified as the expiry of the earlier sentence. It also ordered Probation Service supervision during the suspension period. The judgment does not state the precise conditions of that supervision.