The Court of Criminal Appeal set aside the sentencing approach used for Stephen Aherne’s manslaughter conviction, finding it had involved an error in principle. It then imposed a 10-year sentence, the same duration as the sentence imposed at trial.
Aherne had been sentenced in the Central Criminal Court on 13 October 2003 for the manslaughter of Brian Mulvanney. The Court of Criminal Appeal said the original approach displayed the same error in principle it had identified in a judgment delivered the same day in DPP v Stephen Kelly. It considered the evidence and submissions made on 26 May and 11 June 2004, and applied the sentencing principles summarised in the Kelly judgment.
The judgment records that Aherne was acquitted of murder after a 17-day trial and found guilty of manslaughter. He had offered to plead guilty to manslaughter before trial. He later pleaded guilty to assaulting Matthew O’Dowd and producing an article capable of inflicting serious injury to Karl Dunne. The three-year terms imposed for those counts were to run concurrently with the manslaughter sentence.
The court described the attack that killed Mulvanney as gratuitous and brutal. It said Aherne joined the attack willingly, used a stick or plank to strike Mulvanney several times, and did not play the leading role. The court also noted two earlier attacks on young men in the area that night. It accepted from the jury’s verdict that Aherne did not intend to kill or cause serious injury.
Aherne was just under 16 at the time of the offences, had no previous convictions and had offered a manslaughter plea. The court described those as weighty mitigating factors. It said that without them it would have imposed 14 years’ imprisonment; with them, it imposed 10 years.
The judgment records that the court had indicated it would set aside the conviction and proceed to impose the appropriate sentence. Its concluding passage specifies a 10-year sentence, but the supplied extract does not set out a separate formal order concerning the conviction. It explains that reaching the same sentence length as the trial judge was consistent with correcting the sentencing error.