The State has failed in its bid to get a four-year jail term increased for a former HSE home care assistant who put a knife to the necks of three customers in three separate post office raids in Cork City.
Fintan Tindley (50) from Loughmahon Ave, Mahon, Cork, had pleaded guilty to nine separate offences arising from the robbery and attempted robbery at South Douglas Road Post Office on November 11th and November 18th, 2022, and the robbery at Ballintemple Post Office on November 16th, 2022.
He had been sentenced at Cork Circuit Criminal Court to four years in jail after the trial judge indicated a headline sentence of nine years but took various mitigating factors into account, including Tindley’s guilty plea and lack of previous convictions, reducing the penalty to five years with one year suspended.
Tindley had been trying to get money to pay off debts incurred when visiting his fiance in the United States.
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At a Court of Appeal sitting in Cork on Wednesday, Paula McCarthy BL for the DPP said it had no issue with the headline sentence but believed the sentencing judge had given too much weight to the mitigating factors and failed to take account of the cumulative effect of the offences.
Ms McCarthy pointed out the robberies were pre-planned and Tindley had put a knife to the neck of a 72-year-old man, a 44-year-old woman and a 45-year-old woman in the three raids that happened within a week of each other and within Tindley’s own community.
She acknowledged Tindley had spared his victims the trauma of giving evidence by his guilty pleas, but the State had built a strong case against him where it was able to link him to all three raids by both DNA and CCTV evidence so the value of the plea was not as much as it might be in other cases.
Ms McCarthy pointed out there was no psychiatric or psychological explanation for his behaviour, and it was the DPP’s view that the overall mitigation reducing the nine-year sentence to five years was excessive and the decision to suspend the final year to allow for rehabilitation was incorrect.
Defence counsel Elizabeth O’Connell SC said the trial judge had approached the matter in “a holistic way” and while he had imposed a robust headline sentence, his final calculation of the penalty after taking mitigating factors such as guilty plea and previous good record into account was “nuanced”.
Sitting with Ms Justice Isobel Kennedy and Ms Justice Una Ni Raifeartaigh, Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy said that robbery and putting a knife to someone’s neck were serious offences, but the court believed the trial judge had indicated the correct headline sentence of nine years.
The question was whether the trial judge had exceeded his judicial discretion in considering mitigation and reducing the sentence to five years with one year suspended but the DPP had failed to meet the threshold to prove that was the case, the court found and dismissed the appeal.
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