Prosecutors in the case of former garda Paul Moody, who was jailed this week for coercive control of his former partner, felt they had to take a plea deal due to the health of the victim.
The office of Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) accepted a plea from Moody (42) to a single count of coercive control which carries a maximum of five years in prison.
He had originally been charged with 35 offences relating to a four-year campaign of abuse directed against the woman, who is terminally ill. These included assault, criminal damage, harassment and threats to kill.
Moody, with an address in Kildare, originally planned to go to trial on the offences. But prosecutors feared the victim would not be well enough to attend court by the time the case took place.
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The Circuit Court is dealing with a larger than usual backlog of cases and a shortage of judges. Prosecutors believed they were unlikely to get a trial date before the end of the year, despite the efforts of Circuit Court president Patricia Ryan to find an early date due to the circumstances of the case, sources said.
Even if the 43-year-old woman, who has cancer, was well enough to give evidence, there were concerns about the impact of the process on her health.
Due to the length of her statement, which ran to 260 pages, she would have likely spent about a week in the witness box detailing Moody’s abuse and several more days being cross-examined.
There was also concern Moody would delay the case until the woman’s health deteriorated.
In light of these issues, lawyers considered it prudent to accept a guilty plea to coercive control which would guarantee Moody would spend at least some time in prison.
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He was jailed on Tuesday for three years and three months by Judge Martin Nolan, roughly two-thirds of the maximum sentence available.
It is open to the office of the DPP to appeal the sentence on the grounds of leniency but legal sources said this is highly unlikely.
“While the judge could have gone slightly higher given how abhorrent the offending was, the sentence wasn’t unusually low enough to justify an appeal,” one lawyer said.
Moody had been on bail since shortly after his arrest in June 2021. He was able to take up bail after his one-time friend, Mark O’Keeffe, a Dublin socialite and prominent businessman posted a surety of €8,000, half of which was lodged with the court.
Mr O’Keeffe, who owns the Brown Sugar chain of hair salons and was once Moody’s best man, did not respond to requests for comment yesterday.
A person close to the Dublin businessman said he posted the bail last year after being told the charges were a “misunderstanding” which would soon be cleared up. They said O’Keeffe and Moody are no longer friends and have seen each other a handful of times in recent years.
The pair’s friendship was detailed in a 2013 Irish Times article during which Mr O’Keeffe described Moody as “a great supportive friend” who did not have an aggressive bone in his body.
Moody’s victim “Nicola”, who does not wish to be publicly identified, told RTÉ News yesterday she could not understand how some people close to Moody continued to support him through the criminal process.
She said she has been left physically and mentally exhausted by the process and is due to receive further cancer treatment in the coming weeks.
