A DUBLIN man has been jailed for seven years for the unprovoked stabbing of his girlfriend’s brother, the violence of which was described by the sentencing judge as “wholly gratuitous”.
Kenneth Nolan (35), of Rutland Grove in Crumlin, stabbed Patrick Whelan (41) eight times in the chest and back with a long-bladed knife after first assaulting Mr Whelan’s sister, the mother of his three children, on Father’s Day in June 2009.
The court heard that Nolan was drunk when he punched Pamela Whelan in the face, chest and side, after she refused him entry to the flat.
He threatened to set fire to her parents’ house and then said, “I’m going to kill your f**king brother”, before leaving in a taxi. She tried unsuccessfully to ring her brother and warn him.
Nolan rang Mr Whelan, whom he had known “all of his life”, asking him to meet up so he could get sleeping tablets. But when Mr Whelan arrived at Rutland Grove, Nolan ran at him and stabbed him eight times, leaving him with a collapsed lung and in need of life-saving emergency treatment.
Nolan pleaded guilty to assault causing serious harm before his trial was due to get under way in May at the Central Criminal Court.
The court heard he was “out of his mind on a cocktail of drink and drugs” when he stabbed Mr Whelan, but in handing down sentence, Mr Justice Paul Carney said “the voluntary consumption of drink and drugs form no defence and no mitigation”.
He described the scale of violence involved as “wholly gratuitous” and said the threat to kill on its own carried the maximum penalty of life imprisonment.
He said he had to take into account the effect on Mr Whelan and the fact he suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Mr Justice Carney said he did not find anything mitigating in psychiatric reports he received, which said Nolan had been kidnapped in 2006, and had become “extremely paranoid” and suffered with post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the violence meted out to him. The same applied to evidence that Nolan had a dysfunctional background.
However, while sentencing him to 10 years, the judge took Nolan’s guilty plea into consideration, together with a letter he had written to the court indicating his remorse, and suspended the final three years.