The Court of Appeal has increased the sentence for a man identified as RD in a case involving repeated sexual offences against a child, finding that the original global sentence did not reflect the full seriousness of the offending.
The court quashed the sentence for the section 4 rape offences after finding it unduly lenient under section 2 of the Criminal Justice Act 1993. It resentenced RD to 14 years and six months’ imprisonment on one rape count, suspending the final 18 months for 18 months on the same terms and conditions imposed by the Central Criminal Court. The appeal judgment does not set out those conditions.
The original sentencing judge had imposed a global headline sentence of 13 years for the rape offences before mitigation, then reduced it by two and a half years and suspended the final 18 months. The Court of Appeal held that the resulting sentence failed to account adequately for the wider offending. It said the assaults, public humiliation, three-year harassment campaign, control over the injured party and the lasting harm were aggravating features that placed the global offending in the most serious category.
The injured party was aged 13 to 15 during nearly all the sexual offending, which the judgment said occurred repeatedly over more than two years. RD was almost 11 years older and had been the child’s coach and a trusted adult. The court also referred to violence used alongside some sexual offending and RD’s accepted role in a planned pattern of grooming and control.
The court said the sentencing judge had discretion either to impose a consecutive sentence for the harassment or to reflect the non-sexual offending in a higher global sentence. It found no error in choosing a global approach; the error was that the headline sentence did not adequately reflect the offending’s seriousness.
The Court of Appeal left unchanged the sentences for the other offences: five years for a sexual assault count, two years for assault causing harm counts and three and a half years for harassment. All sentences run concurrently and are backdated to 16 January 2019, the date RD first entered custody. The court did not further reduce the sentence for prison conditions or the delay in the appeal, saying it had received no evidence on the prison-condition claims and that a further reduction for delay was not merited.