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As reported by Sonya McLean of the Irish Independent yesterday, the words above were uttered in the case of a 76 year old man who had repeatedly, and violently raped a 15 year old girl 30 years ago, when he was in his forties. To give just one example of the many that were covered in court of the extent of the depravity of this case:
The court heard that in one incident of rape, the Dublin man called to the girl’s home on the pretext of taking her for an interview for a job at nearby newsagents. He instead took her for a drive to the Wicklow mountains where he raped her.
The court heard that on the drive the teenager was frantic and screaming as she was afraid of what the man might do and was concerned he might kill her. The man told her to shut up and that she would be alright. He handed her a bar of chocolate and a lollipop after raping her.
The girl scrubbed herself raw with bleach afterwards and feared she might be pregnant.
In defence of the Judge, Mr. Justice Patrick McGrath, this is not one of those too-regular cases where the ultimate sentence smacks of leniency. Sentencing the accused, the Judge ultimately confined him to prison for eight years, which may well be a life sentence, considering the age of the guilty man. It is worth noting, though, the factors that were considered in mitigation and which ultimately reduced the sentence by three years:
Mr Justice McGrath imposed a sentence of 11 years. He suspended the final three years of that term, taking into account what he described as the mitigating factors including the man’s current age, that he had been of “otherwise good character and led a pro-social life as a hard-working family man”.
The judge noted many testimonials handed in on the man’s behalf, including one from his wife, which described him as “a doting grandfather”.
It should be noted at this point that what follows is not a criticism of the sentencing Judge: Under Irish law, were the Judge not to consider mitigating factors, or were he to dismiss them altogether, he would simply be inviting grounds for an appeal to the Court of Appeal, which would almost certainly find that the Judge had erred in law by not discounting the headline sentence on account of said factors. The issue here is with sentencing and mitigation in general, not the individual Judge.
If we take them in turn, they are each bizarre. First, considering the “current age” of the convicted man, who committed these offences when he was 41 years of age, is bizarre, and amounts to a discount on the punishment you receive for a crime if you’re able to avoid getting caught for long enough. Clearly, had this man been captured and convicted when he was in his forties, he would not have received a mitigation bonus to his sentence on grounds of his advanced age. The system, in this instance, has effectively decided to punish him less on the grounds that he evaded justice for his abominable crimes for thirty years or so.
Second, the claim that he was of “otherwise good character” is an astonishing one, since his conviction, I would argue, would demolish any claims that his character was actually good. Would this man have been considered of “good character” had it been widely known that he had repeatedly and violently raped a child? Can somebody who commits that offence be considered to be of good character, full stop?
Then we come to the “hard working family man and doting grandfather” schtick – and “schtick” is an appropriate word, given how often the courts hear that line. No defendant in the history of the Irish courts has ever had their defence counsel describe them as “a waste of space in his home life as well, yer honor”. It’s literally, as in this case, the last refuge of the scoundrel.
There’s a philosophical question here, of course: The notion of mitigation as it relates to sentencing conveys the idea that people are rounded characters, and that all of us are capable of both good and evil. The wrongs that we do, some would argue, should be balanced against the good. Perhaps this particular rapist really was a doting grandfather, and perhaps he deserves for that to be mentioned.
There’s a difference, though, between weighing the good and the bad, and allowing the good to offset the bad. In this case, I’d argue the court system is effectively insulting the victim: Yes, he might have destroyed your life, the court is saying, but we’ll reduce the punishment for that for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the harm he did to you.
It’s not that there is no place at all for mitigation: People who plead guilty, for example, and spare their victims the horrors of a trial, have gone some way towards accepting their guilt and demonstrating remorse. That should be incentivised. Those who have made gestures of apology and recompense – financial or otherwise – to their victims have, again, accepted guilt and tried to make it right. They should get credit for that.
In this case, however, the mitigation is not based on remorse, or recompense. It is based instead on the fact that this man avoided justice for thirty years and managed to convince a lot of other people that he was someone other than who he is. The system is rewarding deceit and evasion of responsibility, not anything else.
This case may not provoke a lot of anger – eight years is still a long time in prison for an elderly man, even one as awful as this – but the reasoning for the sentence should still be noted. We shouldn’t be rewarding criminals for hoodwinking us. And that’s exactly what’s happened – it appears – in this case.
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