The Court of Appeal has quashed the sentences imposed on Denis Nolan for rape and sexual assault and resentenced him after finding that the original effective 18-month prison term was unduly lenient.
The court said the central issue in the Director of Public Prosecutions’ review was the period of the sentence that had been suspended. It upheld the sentencing judge’s headline terms of 12 to 13½ years on the rape counts and did not find that the reductions for mitigation were unduly lenient, although it described them as generous given the limited mitigation.
Nolan had pleaded guilty on a full-facts basis to nine counts: five counts of rape under section 4 and four counts of sexual assault. The indictment contained 20 counts in total. On 2 December 2022, he received an effective 18-month sentence, with the sentences running concurrently and all but the final 18 months suspended, except for one count whose sentence was suspended in full.
The judgment said the offending began when the injured party was 12. Nolan, a parish priest involved in the child’s school, asked him to cut lawns for payment. After six to eight weeks, the child said Nolan began asking sexual questions and offered more money for sexual acts. The judgment described offending that escalated from masturbation to oral and anal rape. It said the child was in pain and crying during the anal rapes, and that Nolan sometimes paid him and supplied alcohol.
The sentencing judge had cited the child’s age and vulnerability, the breach of trust, grooming, repeated offending, escalation and impact as aggravating factors. Mitigation included the guilty pleas, some cooperation with the investigation, an apology, age, personal history and engagement with rehabilitation. At the time of sentencing, Nolan was serving sentences of seven years and six years for two other periods of offending.
The DPP argued that the suspension of all but 18 months gave disproportionate weight to those earlier sentences. Nolan’s side relied on proportionality and the totality of the sentences, and challenged as speculative the suggestion that a life sentence might have been considered if all three periods of offending had been before the court together.
The Court of Appeal said the suspended portion left a sentence that did not adequately reflect the gravity of the overall offending. It resentenced Nolan to six years’ imprisonment on each rape count, concurrent with one another and consecutive to the sentence imposed on 15 May 2017. It removed the suspended portions and said Nolan remains on the sex offenders register. The court imposed five years’ post-release supervision and said it would hear further submissions on the conditions. The judgment’s final summary specifies the six-year terms for the rape counts; it does not set out a separate net sentence for the sexual-assault counts.