DPP -v- Christopher Griffin
Neutral citation:(2011) IECCA 62.
Court of Criminal Appeal
Judgment was delivered on October 7th, 2011, by Mr Justice Nial Fennelly, with Mr Justice Declan Budd and Mr Justice Michael Moriarty concurring.
Judgment
An appeal against a life sentence for rape on Christopher Griffin was allowed and the sentence reduced to 15 years of imprisonment. The victim agreed to the applicant being named.
Background
The applicant was sentenced by Mr Justice Paul Carney to life imprisonment on 11 counts of rape and sexual assault on a girl who was between eight and 16 when the offences occurred. She was the daughter of the woman with whom he was living at the time.
The sexual assaults occurred when the girl’s mother was out of the house and escalated in seriousness until, when she was about 13, he forced her to perform oral sex on him.
She complained to her mother and grandmother about it, but neither did anything. She did not report the matter to gardaí, as she lived in an environment where no one would think of going to the gardaí about anything. She was in fear of the applicant, who would often cry after abusing her and ask her not to let him do it again. This made her feel she was responsible.
After a rape committed in 2001, she left the house. In 2002 reported the matter to the gardaí. She said she feared he would abuse her stepsisters.
After the jury returned a guilty verdict, a garda gave evidence of the previous convictions of the applicant and of serious incidents between the two families following his arrest. These included shots being fired into his home and into the homes of members of the complainant’s family. Hand grenades were thrown into the home of the applicant and his nephew, another person was shot dead and a further person shot at near the Irish Financial Services Centre.
Referring to the previous convictions, the court heard these began when Griffin was 15, when he received a two-year sentence for unauthorised taking of motor vehicles. The convictions included for possession of firearms and ammunition, robbery and aggravated burglary.
The victim had been severely traumatised and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. She was affected both by the abuse and the subsequent violence.
Passing sentence, Mr Justice Carney had described the list of previous convictions as “horrendous”. He said the case was one of the utmost gravity and the record was so appallingly bad that a discretionary life sentence was justified.
Michael O’Higgins SC, for Griffin, said the judge was in error in imposing the life sentence and in treating the record as “horrendous”. He said there was no evidence of threats or of violence being involved in the abuse and the only time the applicant had ejaculated was during the oral sex incident.
He said that events occurring outside court during the trial were widely reported. There were unsuccessful applications for discharge of the jury. Thirteen of the convictions had taken place when Griffin was a juvenile. This case itself could not justify life imprisonment.
Deirdre Murphy SC, for the DPP, said there were no mitigating factors and the applicant had engaged continuously in criminality from 1980 to 2001.
Decision
The Court of Criminal Appeal said the procedure followed by the trial judge was unusual, in that evidence was given in the presence of the jurors, but after they had brought in their verdict, of the previous convictions of the applicant and the extraneous events.
“It does not appear that this evidence performed any function or served any legal purpose,” Mr Justice Fennelly said.
He said these events could not be taken into account in deciding the correct sentence to impose. While evidence was given of some sort of feud between criminal elements relating to the trial, no evidence was given identifying the perpetrators or implicating the applicant. He was not charged with the commission of any of those criminal acts and these matters should have been left entirely out of account.
It seemed to the court that the judge attributed some responsibility to the applicant for the “extraneous events” and during the sentence hearing had expressed the view that the material in question was not “at all extraneous”.
Mr Justice Fennelly said the offences themselves were extremely serious, involving abuse by a person in the position of a parent over eight years. It deprived the complainant of enjoyment of her youth and her relationship with her mother, who so dramatically and so irresponsibly failed to respond to her complaint.
There were no mitigating factors, as the applicant had contested the charges at every stage and put the complainant through the ordeal of giving evidence.
The courts had dealt with a great number of sexual abuse cases over the past 20 years or so. This case would probably find its place in the middle tending to the higher end of the spectrum. There had to be a substantial sentence of imprisonment. The issue here was whether a life sentence was appropriate.
The court considered previous judgments in this regard, where a life sentence was seen as appropriate to rare cases where the offences represented the worst imaginable variation of the offence in question. Mr Justice Fennelly said he did not consider the offending in this case, while extremely serious, to warrant the imposition of a life sentence, even taking into account the applicant’s previous convictions.
Taking all the considerations into account, the court considered a sentence of 15 years was warranted and substituted it for the life sentence.
The full judgment is on courts.ie
Michael O’Higgins SC and Breffni Gordon BL, instructed by Michael Staines solicitors, for the applicant; Deirdre Murphy SC and Michael Dillon BL, instructed by the Chief Prosecution Solicitor, for the DPP.