Judges refuse more jail time for plotters of a €2m raid

THE Court of Appeal has refused to increase the jail sentences given to a gang of three armed robbers who plotted a ‘frightening’ €2million heist on a cash-intransit van at a bank.

Judge George Birmingham and two other judges decided yesterday, with ‘very considerable hesitation’, that there was no need to interfere with the sevenand-a-half year sentences handed to suspected tiger kidnapper Stefan Saunders and two accomplices.

This was despite an appeal by Director of Public Prosecutions Claire Loftus, who felt the ten-year sentences for each defendant, with the final two and a half years suspended, were ‘unduly lenient’.

The trio – who all pleaded guilty originally – are due to get out of jail by Christmas 2023 at the latest.

The gang were on the verge of stealing just over €2million – but were all arrested as the cash van arrived by gardaí who had been monitoring them for weeks.

Between August 26 and October 7, 2016, Saunders, 40, from Blanchardstown, west Dublin, and Damien Noonan, 31, from nearby Hartstown, were spotted four times observing cash deliveries – twice from a nearby coffee shop and twice from a van, the court heard.

Then in the early hours of October 7, 2016, Saunders, Noonan and 39-year-old Francis Murphy, of Carranstown, Duleek, Co. Louth, lay in wait for a cash van arriving at an ATM in the wall of a derelict AIB branch in Dunboyne, Co. Meath.

Two of the gang, Saunders and Murphy, waited inside the building, and gardaí entered the building after realising that one of them had a gun.

Giving the appeal court’s decision, Judge Birmingham said that if a tougher sentence had originally been imposed – up to ten years with no part suspended – then the court would ‘very likely’ have upheld such punishments.

But the senior judge explained: ‘The question is whether the lenient sentences imposed are so lenient – so unduly lenient – as to justify intervention by this court.’

The raiders had simultaneously appealed against the severity of those sentences. and their appeals were also dismissed.