A woman who sexually abused her son from when he was an infant up until the age of 11, in what a judge described as “a huge betrayal of trust” has had her jail sentence reduced by two years at the Court of Appeal.
Suzanna Hassett of Westbourne Grove, Clondalkin, pleaded guilty to 13 counts of indecent assault on dates between 1984 and 1987, from the year her son was born until he was three years old.
The 66-year-old also pleaded to four counts of sexual assault on dates between 1992 and 1995 when her son was aged seven and 11 years old. Hassett has no previous convictions.
Fionn Daly waived his anonymity at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court last year to allow his mother to be named.
In his victim impact statement, Mr Daly said he is still trying to understand and come to terms with the “extreme abuse” he was subjected to.
“One of the hardest things to come to terms with is how young I was when it started. I was still in nappies when it started,” he said.
Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard that he made a complaint to gardaí in 2017 in relation to incidents which occurred between 1992 and 1995. After Mr Daly went to gardaí, Hassett entered counselling during which she admitted her offending during the 1980s.
The investigating garda told prosecuting counsel that the victim recalled lying in bed beside his mother. She then took his hand and used it to masturbate herself.
Mr Daly recalled similar incidents took place on days when he was not in school and his father was at work. It is estimated that these incidents took place two or three times a week over 18 months.
Judge Martin Nolan sentenced Hassett in November last year to a total sentence of eight years with the final 18 months suspended on strict conditions, including that she come under the supervision of the Probation Service for 12 months post-release.
At the Court of Appeal on Tuesday Ronan Kennedy SC, for Hassett, said Judge Nolan had failed to set a headline sentence. He argued that the overall sentence had failed to take into account all the mitigating factors in the case and was "simply too high".
Mr Kennedy acknowledged that Hassett was a woman who had committed very grave offences against her son and that this was, as the trial judge had noted, a “very significant betrayal of trust”.
He said the age of the child when the offences occurred brought with it a “deep sense of revulsion”.
“One can’t shy away from that and I don’t,” he said, adding there was no doubt it had a devastating effect on Mr Daly.
“I don’t seek to gloss over any of that, it’s a feature of the case and can’t be ignored,” he said.
However, counsel said on the other side of this was a woman who herself has been abused and who had been sexualised from a young age. He said Hassett had a “distorted view” of her own sexuality to the extent that she had no idea of the damage she was doing by touching her son in this way.
He said she was a person who was clearly psychologically vulnerable.
Mr Kennedy said the woman had attended counselling to address these issues, had raised a family of three children, all of whom were put through third level education and one of whom was with her in court today.
He said by the time the sentencing came around she had lost her family and her home and was living “hand to mouth”, doing voluntary work in the community.
He submitted that Judge Nolan did not take sufficient account of these factors.
“What we say is this case was a case of complexity and there was an abundance of mitigation,” he said adding it was not a case where they were “scraping the bottom of the barrel” for mitigation.
Mr Kennedy also pointed to the fact that the sentencing judge had not set a headline sentence.
However, Court of Appeal President Mr Justice George Birmingham said the failure to set a headline sentence “isn’t determinative of the issue”.
Ms Justice Isobel Kennedy noted Judge Martin is an “extraordinarily experienced trial judge”.
“He attached a high degree of moral culpability because of the massive betrayal and also the harm done so you can take it he placed it at the upper end. It’s not too difficult to interpret that,” she said.
Counsel for the State said the Director of Public Prosecution’s position was that the sentence imposed by Judge Nolan was the correct one.
After rising for a time, the three judges returned to deliver their judgement in the appeal against the severity of sentence.
Regarding the argument that no headline sentence was set, Ms Kennedy said the court has repeatedly said the absence of a headline sentence is not an error in principle.
However, she noted that in cases such as this where the offending is serious and there is much mitigation, the court is of the opinion that a “tiered system” would have been helpful.
In relation to the sentence, she said the court found it was “simply too high”.
Quashing the original sentence, she said the court considered the appropriate headline sentence in respect of the first series of offending, when the child was up to aged three, to be five years. Taking into account the mitigating factors, the court reduced this to three years.
She said the court found the second term of offending, when the child was aged between seven and 11, was of a "serious nature” and was “prolonged and persistent”. She said the court marked the heading sentence for this at five years, reduced to three years with mitigation. Both sentences are to run consecutively.
The overall sentence imposed by the Court of Appeal was six years with the final 18 months suspended.
