Burglars to face longer jail terms
Judges issue landmark ruling on sentencing
SERIAL burglars who frighten or attack vulnerable householders now face up to 14 years in jail – whether or not they intended to confront the occupants – under new sentencing guidelines.
Three judges at the Court of Appeal made the landmark decision yesterday as they sent repeat raiders Michael and David Casey back to jail – on the morning they had expected to be released – until mid-2020.
The two cousins broke into the Limerick home of 62-yearold bachelor pensioner John O’Donoghue almost three years ago, leading to him collapsing and dying ‘of shock’ on the spot.
Their original punishment was a prison sentence of just three-and-a-half years. However, the appeal court yesterday ruled that this jail term was ‘simply not adequate’, and near-doubled it to six years and four months.
But with remission and backdating of their sentences, Michael Casey, 34, of Limerick’s Clonlong halting site, and David Casey, 23, from Coolock, north Dublin, will now serve just two years and one month of additional jail time at the most.
The break-in was part of a carefully planned ‘burglary spree’ on August 27, 2015, in advance of which the pair had bought a black Renault Laguna on the DoneDeal website and registered it under a false name, the court heard.
The case had prompted pleas from Director of Public Prosecutions Claire Loftus for the courts to finally address the ‘serious social problem’ of burglary by creating ‘at least some degree of consistency’ in sentencing.
The Irish Daily Mail exclusively revealed in December that Ms Loftus was taking ‘undue leniency’ appeals in four serious burglary cases, including that of the Casey cousins. Overall, she has won two of those appeals and lost one. In the fourth case, the Polish perpetrator had been released from prison and returned to his home country by the time the appeal reached a full hearing.
As prominently highlighted by the Mail in February, the DPP’s lawyers told the Court of Appeal, as the Caseys’ hearing concluded, that burglars were ‘destroying entire communities and ways of life’ and forcing ‘terrified’ elderly householders to move out of their homes and into sheltered housing.
Ms Loftus’s barrister, sentencing expert Tom O’Malley, had told the court that many householders across Ireland were living in ‘permanent fear and dread of being victimised’ due to the increased prevalence of raids.
Yesterday, laying down new guidelines in a landmark decision, Court of Appeal president George Birmingham, sitting with judges Alan Mahon and John Edwards, set out the circumstances that should place a burglary in either the middle or highest range.
While the law has long stated that burglars can be jailed for up to 14 years, this has rarely been put into practice. This excludes the most severe cases involving aggravated burglary which can potentially attract a life sentence.
Judge Birmingham said it is ‘often a fine call’ for a judge to decide if an offence is in the middle or highest range. And while consistency in sentencing burglars is ‘highly desirable’, uniformity is ‘not to be expected... in terms of the actual sentences’ imposed from now on, he added.
The judges ruled that the ‘mid-range’ of burglary offending must, from now on, merit sentences of between four and nine years – while offending in the ‘highest range’ should lead to sentences of between nine and 14 years. However, in reality, those ‘headline’ sentences are subject to reductions on time served for mitigating factors in the burglar’s favour, the court pointed out.
‘Serious social problem’ Consistency ‘is highly desirable’