The Court of Appeal has increased Darren DeLacey’s sentence for possessing heroin and cocaine worth €108,087 for sale or supply from four years to six years.
The new sentence must run consecutively to an earlier sentence from Mullingar Circuit Court under which DeLacey was serving an effective four years. The result is a total actual custodial term of ten years.
The offence occurred on May 22, 2017. Acting on confidential information, Gardaí followed a car towards Inchicore in which DeLacey was a passenger. When the car was stopped, officers recovered a plastic bag from between his feet containing 744 grams of heroin and 55 grams of cocaine.
DeLacey admitted carrying the drugs and said he was to receive €500 for delivering them. He said he had a significant drug debt linked partly to his cocaine addiction. He was transporting the drugs from Dublin to Limerick and was not directing the wider operation.
At the time, DeLacey was on bail for two earlier section 15A offences committed on May 11, 2016. He was later convicted of those offences and received seven years with the final three suspended.
For the 2017 offence, the sentencing judge selected a seven-year headline sentence and reduced it to four years, consecutive to the earlier term. The DPP challenged that sentence as unduly lenient.
The Court of Appeal agreed that the original headline figure was too low. It stressed that DeLacey had committed another serious drug offence within a year of the earlier offences and while on bail.
However, the court also accepted that he was a transporter rather than an organiser, had addiction and debt problems, made immediate admissions, cooperated with Gardaí and pleaded guilty early.
It therefore declined to impose the presumptive ten-year minimum. The court instead selected ten years before mitigation, reduced that to seven years and then to six years to reflect the burden of being resentenced. The six-year term remains consecutive to the earlier four-year effective sentence.