The Court of Appeal dismissed the Director of Public Prosecutions’ applications to review the sentences of Derek Naylor and Paul Goddard, who had received four-year prison terms suspended in full for offences involving cannabis. The court said the offending was serious enough that a custodial sentence could not ordinarily have been avoided, but declined to intervene because of delay in progressing the reviews.
The offences took place on 24 August 2016. Naylor pleaded guilty to possessing cannabis resin for sale or supply under section 15A of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1977. The cannabis was valued at an estimated €147,498. Goddard pleaded guilty to the same offence and two possession offences involving amphetamine and cannabis. The amphetamine offence was taken into consideration. The sentencing judge imposed four years on each section 15A offence and suspended both sentences entirely. Goddard also received a concurrent two-year sentence for a cannabis possession offence, also suspended.
The sentencing judge had set a five-year headline sentence before mitigation and reduced it to four years for each man. The DPP did not challenge those terms or the decision to depart from the presumptive minimum sentence. The review focused on the full suspension and argued that Goddard’s sentence should reflect his greater culpability, including the additional offences.
The Court of Appeal considered the mitigating circumstances cited at sentencing. Naylor said he had become involved because of a drugs debt connected to cocaine addiction; the sentencing court also heard about his guilty plea, remorse, treatment and low risk of reoffending. Goddard said he delivered the bags to address threats to his family linked to a drug debt. The sentencing court heard evidence of his good character, community work and lack of previous convictions. The DPP argued that the full suspensions gave too much weight to mitigation and, in Goddard’s case, did not sufficiently account for evidence being discarded.
The appeal court said the seriousness of drug dealing called for general deterrence and that custody would have been required in the ordinary course. It indicated that, absent the delay, suspending up to half of Naylor’s four-year term and 15 months of Goddard’s term could have been appropriate. Those were observations about a possible sentence, not new sentences imposed by the court.
The court noted that the review applications were lodged on 8 February 2018 but were not ready to proceed until July 2019. A hearing in October 2019 was adjourned over missing documents; the DPP filed them on 11 December 2019, and Goddard supplied a medical report in February 2020. Given the delay and, for Naylor, an uncontradicted submission that he had been fully rehabilitated, the court said it would not impose custody years after the offences. It declined to quash the original decision and dismissed both applications.