The Court of Appeal has dismissed an appeal against the severity of an eight-year sentence imposed on a man who pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a 19-year-old woman in Mullingar in 2008.
The judgment, delivered by Mr Justice Sheehan on 6 July 2015, upheld the sentence imposed by Hunt J. in November 2013. The sentence provided for the final third to be suspended for three years, subject to the appellant keeping the peace and being of good behaviour. It also included two years of post-release supervision, requiring compliance with reasonable probation service orders.
The woman was walking home from a disco in Moate at about 2am on 27 October 2008 when the appellant approached her on a side street, put her in a headlock and dragged her into a secluded wooded area. The judgment says he groped her, pulled down her underwear and his trousers, and appeared to attempt anal penetration. Passers-by heard what was happening and approached; the woman escaped and the appellant fled. He was arrested some days later after a Garda investigation. During his arrest, he acknowledged being with her but said any sexual activity had been consensual.
The judgment records that the woman suffered bruising and received treatment that night. She later had difficulty sleeping, attended counselling, became anxious about going out at night and no longer felt able to go out alone. These details were set out in a victim impact report considered at sentencing.
The appellant’s appeal argued that the sentencing judge had wrongly treated as aggravating a potential advantage from his earlier guilty plea in a separate rape case. That later case arose from an incident with another person, and the Court of Appeal said the material before it contained limited details. The appellant had been charged in that case while on bail for the Mullingar offence and was sentenced in the Central Criminal Court in 2012 to eight years for rape, with the final three years suspended, and a concurrent two-year term for sexual assault. That sentence was backdated to September 2010.
The Court of Appeal held that the sentencing judge was entitled to take the subsequent convictions into account. It found that the judge had properly set an eight-year starting point, with the maximum sentence identified as ten years, and carefully accounted for the guilty plea and other mitigating factors when suspending portions of the term. The court said the sentence was correct in both approach and outcome and dismissed the appeal.