A JUDGE yesterday apologised to the victim of a mugging after evidence that the culprit should have been in jail at the time he carried out the assault.
The court heard that the Garda Pulse system had not recorded that he was on suspended sentence at the time.
The court heard the teenage mugger should have been in prison serving a two-year sentence for assault when he attacked and robbed a nightclub employee as he walked home from work, leaving him with a broken cheekbone and multiple cuts and bruises.
Judge Raymond Groarke offered his sincere apologies to the victim at Galway Circuit Criminal Court yesterday after it emerged that his attacker, Shannon Walsh (19), with an address at Lus Leana, Headford Road, Galway, should not have been on the loose at the time of the attack in December, 2007, and should have been in prison instead serving a lengthy sentence for another assault which he had committed the previous year.
Walsh, who has 39 previous convictions, and his co-accused, Nathan Furey (19), of Claren, Claregalway, and formerly of Tudor Vale, Oranmore, pleaded guilty to robbing a 32-years-old man of his jacket, ring, house keys, €14 cash and a headset at Dock Road, Galway, on December 30th, 2007.
Walsh received a three-year sentence while Furey, who had no previous convictions, was given a suspended three-year sentence.
Walsh, the court heard, had been given a two-year prison sentence in the Circuit Criminal Court in March, 2007 for another serious assault committed in the city in 2006. That sentence was suspended at the time on condition Walsh not reoffend for two years.
However, he continued to offend and while he was brought before Galway District Court on at least nine occasions in the last two years for those, the Pulse system – which gardaí rely on to show a person’s previous convictions – had not recorded the suspended sentence imposed with conditions by the Circuit Criminal Court in March, 2007.
As a result, the matter was never brought back before the court and the suspended sentence was never activated when Walsh breached its terms by continuing to commit crime.
At 6.05am on December 30th, 2007, he and Furey, who were both intoxicated, mugged a night-club employee walking home from work.
Garda Paul McNulty gave evidence that he found the victim in a very distressed state with his face covered in blood shortly after the assault.
The man said he had been assaulted and robbed by two teenagers wearing hoodies. They had jumped him from behind, knocked him to the ground and kicked him repeatedly in the face and about the body. His attackers, he said, kept shouting at him to hand over money and they advised him not to look up as he was being kicked and beaten.
The judge described Walsh as “hardened criminal and a recidivist”.
He activated the two-year sentence which had been suspended in March 2007 and he apologised to the victim of this latest assault that Pulse had failed to record Walsh’s previous conviction.
The judge said Walsh had been the “progenitor” of this latest attack.
He sentenced him to three years in prison, consecutive to the activated two-year sentence. He suspended the final two years of the sentence on condition that following his release from prison he would keep the peace for five years, abstain from drink and drugs and come under the supervision of the probation service.