The Court of Appeal has reduced Matthew Conroy's prison term from an effective seven years to three years for five offences committed in quick succession around Thurles, Co Tipperary, in November 2012.
The offences began with Conroy breaking into Mr Mannix's home, taking car keys, stealing his car and taking €15 from it. He later crashed the vehicle while being pursued by Gardaí. Immediately before the pursuit, he also placed Garda Collins at grave risk while manoeuvring the car in an attempt to escape.
Nenagh Circuit Criminal Court had imposed two groups of concurrent sentences and then ordered those groups to run consecutively. This produced a seven-year term, with the final 18 months suspended.
The Court of Appeal regarded the endangerment offence as the most serious. It held that Garda Collins escaped serious injury only through quick thinking and an agile reaction. The three-year sentence for that offence was therefore left unchanged. A two-year term for criminal damage arising from the crash was also upheld.
However, the court found the sentences for the other offences unduly severe. It placed particular weight on unchallenged evidence that Conroy had entered Mr Mannix's house believing it was unoccupied and intending only to find somewhere to sleep, and that he left promptly when he discovered otherwise.
The court reduced the sentence for stealing €15 from three years to six months, the burglary sentence from four years to one year and the car-theft sentence from three years to one year.
It also found an error in ordering consecutive sentences. Although Conroy had 90 previous convictions, most were relatively minor and commonly associated with intoxication. The offences before the court were also closely linked and occurred over a short period.
All five substituted sentences were ordered to run concurrently. The resulting sentence was three years' imprisonment with no portion suspended.