A 14-year sentence imposed on a serial rapist was increased yesterday to 17 years by the Court of Criminal Appeal after it heard the man had committed a second rape just six months after being released from prison having served a long sentence on an earlier rape charge.
George Birmingham SC, for the Director of Public Prosecutions, had asked the appeal judges to impose a life sentence on Patrick O'Driscoll for the rape of a young mother in Co Cork in September 2000.
He said O'Driscoll was at the time of this rape out of jail just six months, having served nine years of a 12-year sentence for rape. When he carried out the rape in September 2000, it was a "carbon copy" of an earlier rape attack in which he had also dragged a woman on to waste ground.
O'Driscoll (36), of Fermoy, Co Cork, was convicted at the Central Criminal Court on July 10th, 2003, of the rape of a woman in September 2000.
He was sentenced to 14 years' imprisonment.
He had been freed from prison in March 2000 having served a sentence on an earlier rape count.
Yesterday O'Driscoll brought an appeal against his conviction, which was rejected by the appeal court.
The judges went on to consider the DPP's argument that the 14-year sentence was unduly lenient in this case.
Opposing the DPP's application, Ciaran O'Loughlin SC, for O'Driscoll, argued that 14 years was a very long sentence.
Giving the court's decision, Mr Justice Hugh Geoghegan, presiding, and sitting with Mr Justice Vivian Lavan and Mr Justice Eamon de Valera, said this was an unusually bad case.
An appalling rape had been committed by the accused in classic circumstances where he came from nowhere and raped the woman in an episode which took quite a long time. This rape occurred when O'Driscoll had just come out of prison, having served a sentence for a rape committed in almost similar circumstances.
Because this second rape was committed so soon after he came out of prison, the court considered the 14-year sentence was unduly lenient and had decided the appropriate sentence should be 17 years.
During his trial at the Central Criminal Court, the victim of the second rape, a 27-year-old mother, said O'Driscoll had taken her life away from her, and she pleaded with the judge not to "let him take away anyone else's".