Below are the basic facts of Judge Melanie Greally’s sentencing reasoning, delivered yesterday morning in the matter of one Mr. Stephen Gregan, found with over 100 images and videos of child sexual abuse, and with a previous conviction for sexually assaulting an eleven year old girl – for which he received the now customary suspended sentence from Judge Martin Nolan.
The original reporting here is by Sonya McLean and Eimear Dodd for the Irish Times:
Gregan of Main Street, Tullamore, Co Offaly, previously of Grove Park, Rathmines, Dublin pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to possession of child pornography at his Dublin home on June 13th, 2017.
The court heard that in October 2019 Gregan received a nine-month suspended sentence from Judge Martin Nolan after he pleaded guilty to sexual assault at Penneys, Dundrum Town Centre, on June 10th, 2017.
Imposing sentence on Monday, Judge Melanie Greally said if this charge had been dealt with at the same time as the sexual assault count, it would have resulted in a custodial sentence.
However, Judge Greally said the court had to consider the length of time since the material was seized and if there would be “undue harshness in imposing a custodial sentence” at this point.
She said the steps taken by Gregan to rehabilitate himself, the lack of subsequent negative garda attention and the time lapsed since the offence was detected “swing the balance against the immediate imposition of a custodial sentence”.
The bit in bold is the subject of my headline above: The convicted man in this matter clearly has a sexual predilection for children. He sexually assaulted a child. He also had images and videos in his possession of children being sexually assaulted, which, it is clear, he used for his own sexual pleasure.
Taken together, according to Judge Melanie Greally, those would have warranted a jail sentence. But because the two matters were tried separately, he got a suspended sentence for both.
This, clearly, is not justice: It amounts to saying that one plus one does not equal two. If Stephen Gregan was found guilty of sexual assault and possession of child abuse images on the same day, he would have gone to prison. But because they were on different days, he avoids prison. This, besides any other considerations, turns the administration of justice into a game of chance: Some other offender, for whom the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) gets his act in gear, will end up in prison if his two offences happen to be heard concurrently. Mr. Gregan escapes jail because they were heard separately. The merits of what he did are not the primary factor, according to the Judge, in whether to send him to jail.
This is, I would argue, the kind of reasoning that could only emerge from a system as byzantine and bureaucratic as the Irish legal system: The results might not make any sense, but the results are always less important than the process. The process here is what the Judge was taking into account – not what Mr. Gregan actually did.
All of this, by the way, before we consider the facts of the matter: We live in a country now where you can sexually assault an eleven year old girl and get a suspended sentence. We live in a country where you can get caught getting your sexual jollies from videos of children being raped, and get a suspended sentence.
There is, and has ever been, a certain reluctance in the media to criticise Judges. They are supposed to be separate from politics – that is why they serve for life or until retirement, and cannot be removed by the public. The basic idea is that if we started electing Judges, sentencing might suddenly get a lot tougher around election time.
Personally, I’m not sure that’s a drawback – but the fairness concerns are legitimate.
In any case, being separate from the political system does not mean that you should be above criticism. Judges Nolan and Greally have managed, between them, to let a serial sexual offender against children escape even a day in prison on the basis of a technicality about when his two cases were heard. That is a result, I would argue, that no normal person would manage to arrive at. It is a result that the legal system nevertheless produced.
Which makes one wonder: Is the legal system as currently constituted serving the public, and is it fit for purpose?