Some moments in court must remain unforgettable, and one such came the other day when the rapist Salman Aslam Dar told Mr Justice Paul Carney that he was sorry for what he had done, beseeching forgiveness, and declaring that he wanted to be a good man.
Prosecuting counsel Mary Ellen Ring SC then rose and asked him if that was the first time he had offered an apology, for rapes, mark you, that went back to February of last year. The wretch remained silent for several minutes, no doubt searching his abominable mind for a way of getting out of that one.
Then unable to concoct a reply, he then said, "I am sorry." Well, of course he was sorry then; why wouldn't he be? The gun of imprisonment was to his head, and he had much to be sorry about: namely the years in jail that lay ahead. He was sentenced to three terms of seven years by Mr Justice Paul Carney for the three rapes that he committed on the northside of Dublin over a few vicious, methodical months. However, the judge drew attention to the fact that the Court of Criminal Appeal reduced to 15 years the 21-year jail sentence he had passed on a taxi driver who raped three women in a single night. Not wanting his sentence on Dar to go the same way, he suspended two years of each of the seven sentences, in effect giving this triple rapist the same as the earlier one.
Well, it's understandable why Paul Carney felt his hands tied: no one likes the public rebuke of having one's judgment rejected. But this 15-year sentence cannot be right. Provided he is a good boy in jail, this Dar creature will be out in 10 years, when he will be just 33, and - one hopes - on the next plane back to poor bloody Pakistan. But at that same age, Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, was only half-way through his career as a serial killer.
To be sure, part of the reduced sentence reflects Dar's guilty plea. Courts often take this option in recognition of the trauma which raped women have to go through when giving evidence against a not guilty plea. However, there are clearly limits to the wisdom of a such a policy, as the case of Salman Aslam Dar illustrates, because in pleading guilty he was acting purely out of self-interest.
Two of the rape-victims had picked him out in identity parades, and his DNA matched that found in the bodies of his victims; and, since they had been savagely attacked and beaten - he smashed one woman's head against a wall many times - a plea of consensual sex was not possible. In other words, in that curious expression one hears on television but nowhere else, he was bang to rights.
Here is the real paradox. The stronger the case against you in a rape case, the more likely that you will be able to avail of the rewards of a guilty-plea. A not guilty plea is certain to fail, so the accused actually benefits from the spectacular flagrancy of his crime. This is surely wrong, yet it is a traditional practice of our courts. Thus a man who beats his victim senseless and savagely rapes her, leaving his semen inside her, can actually benefit from his ruthlessness. The less savage, possibly more ambiguous rape, leaves no such escape route.
Surely it is right for the judge to retain full discretionary powers over sentencing, regardless of whether or not a guilty plea has been entered. Discretion is discretion: the judge may take the guilty plea into account, but it cannot be right that a sentence reduction is now almost contractually written into court practice, when the guilty plea was simply cynical realism.
The deal should be the other way: not a lighter tariff for guilty plea, but a heavier one for a tendentious not guilty one. The rapist who has made his victims go through the trauma of describing the most terrible ordeal of their lives should know that there is a price to pay for that: life meaning life. Maybe this will not deter rapists, but it will give a clear signal to women of how society regards the integrity of their bodies, their minds and their lives.
Perhaps the most astonishing item of all in this trial was that it was told by a psychologist who had interviewed Dar that Dar said the first victim had been racially abusive to him. Excuse me. But how is this relevant to a violent rape? Violent rape is without a context. It exists in a class of quite of its own; no mitigation, no provocation, no allurement, no enticement, no marital vow and no extenuating circumstances can relieve it of its utter and unspeakable awfulness.
Moreover, surely such evidence amounts to hearsay. And we no longer live in a world where hearsay can simply be dismissed as such. Quite the reverse. When Newsweek published a baseless rumour that the Koran was being flushed down the toilets of Guantanamo, 20 people died in the consequent riots in Pakistan and Afghanistan. An Irish court heard an allegation made by Dar that his first victim had been racially abusive to him. This is non-evidence, but to credulous minds, it could appear that the rapist had somehow been "provoked", and was in fact the victim. Such evidence is legally permissible. But it would be better not dignified in the public forum of an Irish court, but instead in a judge's chambers.