Law required children convicted of murder to face mandatory life imprisonment if they reached age of 18 before sentencing
A law that required children convicted of murder to face mandatory life imprisonment if they reached 18 before sentencing has been ruled unconstitutionalA law that required children convicted of murder to face mandatory life imprisonment if they reached the age of 18 before sentencing has been ruled unconstitutional by the High Court.
The application was made by Seamus Clarke SC, Mark Lynam SC, Keith Spencer BL and Oisín Clarke BL on behalf of two teenagers charged with the murder of Tristan Sherry at Browne’s Steakhouse in Blanchardstown on Christmas Eve last year.Enoch Burke jailed for third time over refusal to stay away from Wilson’s Hospital School‘I love Ireland. Ireland is 100% different to back home.
Thomas O’Malley SC, a retired senior law lecturer at University of Galway, said he “warmly welcomes” the judgment. “The present law, as we understand it, is downright unjust,” he said. “It is often a matter of chance whether a child charged with murder has reached the age of 18 years by the time of conviction.”“The reason why we hold that children should not be imprisoned and, if detained at all, only as a last resort, is that children are inherently less culpable than adults,” he said.
Another leading barrister, who did not want to be named, said it had “once again” fallen on the courts to “rectify one of the glaring and often identified inequities in the law on the sentencing of children”. Both were 13 when they murdered Ana at Glenwood House at Laraghcon, Clonee Road, Lucan, on May 14th, 2018. They were convicted by unanimous jury verdicts in June 2019 and were still children when they came before Mr Justice Paul McDermott for sentencing later that year.
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