The Court of Criminal Appeal has doubled to six years the three-year prison sentence imposed on Vincent McKenna, a former campaigner with Families Against Intimidation and Terror (FAIT), for a series of sexual assaults on his daughter, Sorcha, over an eight-year period.
In November 2000, McKenna (38) was given concurrent sentences in respect of a number of the charges at Monaghan Circuit Court. However, the three-judge court said yesterday it was strongly of the view that it would be "an injustice to the public" not to impose consecutive sentences in respect of some of the counts.
The overall effect of the court's decision is that McKenna will serve six years instead of three. The jail term runs from November 10th, 2000.
Mr Justice Geoghegan said Sorcha, now aged 20, was sexually abused by her father more or less continuously from the time she was four years old until she was about 12. Some of the offences were "particularly depraved".
An appeal against the leniency of the Circuit Court sentence was taken by the Director of Public Prosecutions under the Criminal Justice Act 1993.
McKenna, from Aughnacloy, Co Tyrone, has an address at Haypark Avenue, Ormeau Road, Belfast.
Mr Justice Geoghegan said it seemed the Circuit Court judge had taken into account as a mitigating factor the rather unusual circumstances that McKenna, while living in Belfast, had taken a strong public stance against terrorism and had been associated with FAIT. He had spoken out for a group of people who were taken to back alleys and knee-capped.
As McKenna's counsel had pointed out, the corollary of all that was that huge publicity was attached to the case, especially in the context that his daughter had waived anonymity.
Mr Justice Geoghegan said the trial judge had not overlooked the non-mitigating factors, such as the particularly degrading nature of some of the offences and the fact that McKenna had fought charges all the way to the jury.
The trial judge was entitled to some extent to take into account as a mitigating factor the special history of McKenna and the extreme adverse publicity surrounding the offences. However, given the approach which the Circuit Court judge adopted, the Court of Criminal Appeal considered that the judge fell into error in directing all the sentences to run concurrently. He had a discretion which, in the circumstances, he ought to have exercised to impose a consecutive element in the sentences.
The sentences related to convictions for indecent assault from November 1st, 1985, to January 18th, 1991, and convictions for sexual assault from January 18th, 1991, to December 31st, 1993.