Irish Court of Criminal Appeal

THE COURT OF CRIMINAL APPEAL

Kearns J.

Budd J.

Birmingham J.

[99/08]

BETWEEN

THE PEOPLE AT THE SUIT OF THE DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC PROSECUTIONS

RESPONDENT

AND

CHRISTOPHER HILL

APPLICANT

JUDGMENT of the Court (ex tempore) delivered the 24th day of October, 2008 by Kearns J.

This appeal arises out of an incident which occurred outside a dwelling house in Santry on 28th February, 2004. Essentially it was a barney between neighbours which escalated and went completely out of control.

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Mr. Hill lived next door to a house where a confirmation party was taking place. Obviously it was quite a noisy event because despite Mr Hill having made attempts to quell the noise and having phoned the gardai twice the party continued late and eventually matters spilled over outside when Mr. Hill got more and more agitated and annoyed. He called to the neighbour's house and there issued a stream of abuse in the most obnoxious terms to those who lived there. At 3 a.m. the matter took a further step when in a effort as it were to try and meet the situation the owner of the house and Mr. Hill came face to face outside Mr. Hill's house and at that point Mr. Hill, who was obviously in a very agitated condition, burst out of the house with a hatchet and although his neighbour was there with two other men it didn't prevent Mr. Hill from using the hatchet to strike his neighbour on the head and in the stomach.

The learned sentencing judge was quite entitled to take into account that this was a serious assault involving what can only be described as a weapon which can inflict serious, if not fatal, injuries. The unfortunate householder, whose name I am deliberately omitting because he has since moved elsewhere in the city as a result of the trauma and stress induced by this whole episode, suffered a nasty head injury which required ten or a dozen stitches in hospital and also a gash to his stomach.

There was a significant delay before the matter did come to court in December, 2007. It had been put back by the learned judge to see if

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Mr. Hill was disposed to offer some form of financial compensation to the victim of the assault. At that stage Mr. Hill had gathered some €5,000 together as an indication of his remorse for what had happened and the matter was put further back to see if he could improve, so to speak, on that position. Ultimately, by the time the matter came on for sentence he had garnered together the sum of €12,000 which was a very significant sum and which was duly paid over to the victim of the assault. It was a sum which fairly reflects, it seems to the Court, the actual injuries sustained by the victim other than the psychological sequelae.

The applicant is forty-three years of age and has two dependent teenage children. He is unfortunate in that he has a significant long term viral infection from previous drug abuse and he is a man with previous convictions. Two of those, it has to be said, include offences of assault but as has been pointed out in the course of an able submission by his counsel, those two prior convictions for assault were as far back as 1988 and 1989. He has had fifteen years of non-offending and his counsel submits that really this indicates what might be described as the youthful pattern of behaviour on Mr. Hill's part had come to an end and that he is a responsible member of society.

The key element in this submission is that Mr. Hill's behaviour on the night in question can be in part be explained by reference to the medication he was on. Part of his medication included steroids which it is


 


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suggested were capable of producing mood swings and sudden uncontrollable bouts of anger and emotion. In fact it is suggested that this is what happened on the night in question and really the catalogue of events provides, it must be said, some support for an interpretation in accordance with that submission. This is not a case where there was a premeditated assault in the sense that there was premeditation going back over days or weeks ahead of this incident. It seems to the Court that there was something in the nature of the bizarre and unexpected about the whole evening.

That said, it was very serious offence, but the Court feels that the payment of significant compensation, while it can never serve as any kind of guarantee or even an indication that a person will not receive a custodial sentence, nonetheless it is a factor to which due weight must be given by a sentencing judge. The Court feels in all the circumstances of this particular case, having regard to the fact that the maximum sentence for this offence was five years, that to impose a sentence of four years, albeit with one year suspended, in circumstances where virtually full compensation had been paid to the victim, did represent an error of principle and the Court in those circumstances takes the view that a larger portion of the sentence should have been suspended.

The Court takes the view that the four year sentence imposed by the sentencing judge was correct but that two years of that sentence
 


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should have been suspended and not merely one. The Court will vary the order accordingly.