Eight-year sentence for sexual assault

A 21-YEAR-OLD man who attacked a woman in her 60s as she was walking home from bingo, dragged her off the main road and sexually assaulted her, before threatening to kill her, has been jailed for eight years.

Liam Smith from Batt Donegan Place, Charleville, Co Cork, had pleaded guilty to one count of sexually assaulting the woman and two counts of threatening to kill her at the Turretts, Rathgoggan, Charleville, on September 18th, 2011.

Yesterday, Det Garda Gary Costelloe told Cork Circuit Criminal Court how Smith had come up behind the woman as she walked home and punched her twice on the back of the head until she fell to the ground, whereupon he dragged her into the driveway of a house.

Smith then dragged the woman along the ground and threatened to kill her if she did not stop screaming. He punched her in the face and knocked out her dentures, and then carried out a serious sexual assault.

Smith again threatened to kill the woman six or seven times and left, only to return moments later. The women feared he was coming back to kill her, but he left again and she managed to make her way to the road, where she flagged down a van and got help.

The woman suffered extensive physical injuries. She spoke in her victim impact statement of how she could cope with the beatings but was struggling to deal with the invasive sexual assault, which she still could not understand.

“First thing every morning and last thing every night, I think about the sexual assault that Liam Smith carried out on me . . . at least twice a week when I go to bed, I live through the entire experience again,” she said in the statement read to the court by Det Garda Costello.

“I find it so hard to get out of bed sometimes – I even sometimes have to put the bedcovers over my head and tell myself out loud to get up, get out of bed . . . sometimes I get really down, really low,” she said.

The woman told how she was on antidepressants but said she had received great support from her family and her work colleagues. “Hopefully some day I will manage to pick up the pieces and move on.”

The woman left the courtroom as Smith took the witness box to apologise for his actions, saying that he could never express his remorse for what he had done and that he was out of his head with drink and drugs at the time but he knew that was no excuse.

Judge Patrick Moran noted that he himself had given Smith a two-year suspended sentence in February 2011, and Smith was at large as a result, but he never had expected that Smith would commit such a horrific crime when he suspended that two-year sentence.

Judge Moran activated the two-year suspended sentence for assault, and observing that Smith had subjected his victim to “a disgusting and revolting” assault, he then imposed an eight-year sentence for the sexual assault to run consecutively with the reactivated two-year term.