The couple found guilty of neglect in relation to the death of Evelyn Joel (59) in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, were yesterday sentenced by a judge to do 240 hours’ community service in lieu of a two-year jail term.
It was the first conviction of its kind in Ireland for manslaughter through neglect of a family member.
Eleanor Joel (38) and her partner, Jonathan Costen (40), were convicted last December by a jury at Wexford Circuit Criminal Court of the unlawful killing through neglect of Joel’s mother, Evelyn, on January 7th, 2006.
Yesterday Judge Seán Ó Donnabháin ordered them to do community service rather than go to jail on condition that they be of good behaviour for a period of two years, including that they be sober in public at all times.
Evelyn Joel, who had multiple sclerosis, died at Wexford General Hospital on January 7th, 2006, having been taken there on New Year’s Day from her daughter’s home at Cluain Dara, Enniscorthy, where she had been found in bed with bed sores and lying in her own excrement.
‘Medieval picture’
Imposing sentence, Judge Ó Donnabháin said: “The evidence was gruesome in the extreme – it was evidence of a terminally ill woman abandoned to lie in her own filth in her own room in the accused’s house and it depicted an almost medieval picture of neglect.”
He noted the defence had sought to portray the State agencies as having abandoned the accused but that attempt to hold the State agencies responsible had been put before the jury who had roundly rejected it by finding the two accused guilty by a majority 11-1 verdict. Notwithstanding that, it was true that were it not for the co-operation of the accused in making statements detailing Ms Joel’s deterioration, the State would not have been able to bring a successful prosecution against them, he said.
Co-operation
“These people would never have been convicted but for their own statements . . . if you were dependent on the State agencies, it [the trial] would never have started . . . the HSE was as removed from this case as from Rockall.”
He heard a victim impact statement prepared by Evelyn Joel’s siblings, who described their sister as “kind and gentle” and they hated what the accused had done to her which they described as “unforgettable and unforgivable”.
Eleanor Joel’s counsel, Rosario Boyle SC, said her client had grown up in a very dysfunctional home where her mother had left three times with the accused and her brother when they were children because of their father’s heavy drinking and abuse.
Jonathan Costen’s barrister, Dan Walsh, said his client had left school at 14 and had worked intermittently as a labourer before being laid off from a back-to-work scheme in 2005 and he was also drinking heavily at the time of the neglect, consuming six to eight cans of beer a night.
The judge stressed it was important that a salutary lesson and deterrent be drawn from the case. He believed a community service order sentence would help decrease the pair’s isolation.
