Unnamed woman jailed for serious harm and false imprisonment

This report is a localnews.ie summary based on public court reporting and records; sources are listed below.

An unnamed woman was sentenced to nine years in jail, with the final two years suspended, for assault causing serious harm and false imprisonment. Mr Justice David Keane imposed concurrent nine-year sentences for those offences and a two-year sentence for producing a large kitchen knife in a manner likely to unlawfully intimidate another person. The proceedings were reported on 6 October 2022.

The woman had originally faced two counts of attempted murder arising from events at her home on 9 October 2019, but those charges were later dropped. She pleaded guilty to intentionally or recklessly causing serious harm to one child, producing the knife and falsely imprisoning a social care worker.

The sentence was backdated to October 2019, when she first went into custody. The judge accepted that she had been suffering from a mental disorder, but said it did not meet the threshold for an insanity defence. Defence counsel cited her psychiatric history, including that she had not taken antipsychotic medication for three days before the incident; the court heard there was no evidence of psychosis on her admission to hospital.