Prison officer jailed for breaching barring order

A 40-year-old prison officer has been jailed for 18-months after he breached a barring order and called to his wife’s house equipped with latex gloves and threatened to kill her.

Greg Lynch pleaded guilty at Cork Circuit Criminal Court to threatening to kill his wife Leanne at her home in Ballinhassig in Co Cork on May 23rd, 2014.

Garda Declan Lynch told the court how he and his colleagues responded to an emergency call on the night in question and found Lynch in the sitting room of the house wearing blue latex gloves.

The garda said Leanne Lynch was in the kitchen and deeply distressed after the incident, during which Lynch had said that if he could not have her, no one else would.

“He said to her ‘Do you know what is going to happen to you tonight . . . I am going to kill you . . . You won’t see past [midnight].”

The garda said some neighbours had responded to an alert by Ms Lynch and called to the house, and that if it were not for their intervention, the incident could have ended in tragedy.

Victim impact statement

Ms Lynch said in a victim impact statement how her life had been made a misery by her husband and how she now lived in constant fear of him since he threatened to kill her.

She said that she could never forgive the prison officer for what he did and she never wanted to see him again.

Lynch, who is originally from Greenmount in Cork but has been living at Foxborough Rise, Lucan, Co Dublin, was working as a prison officer in Mountjoy at the time of the incident.

His relationship with his wife had deteriorated to the point that Ms Lynch was forced to get a barring order against him in March 2013, which he breached on the night in question.

Cross-examined by Lynch’s barrister, Donal O’Sullivan BL, Garda Lynch said he agreed that Lynch had sent his wife some texts earlier in the evening which did not make any threats but which suggested that he did not accept that their marriage was over.

The garda said that Lynch had not gone near his wife since the incident in May 2014 and that he had fully abided by bail conditions that he stay out of Co Cork pending his trial.

‘Very serious offence’

Judge Sean O Donnabhain said the case involved a very serious offence which carried a maximum sentence of ten-years upon conviction and which had a number of worrying factors.

The judge said that as a result, even on a guilty plea, he believed the offence still merited a custodial sentence.

Judge O Donnabhain imposed a five-year jail sentence but suspended the last three-and-a-half-years on condition that Lynch not come within five miles of his wife upon his release from jail.