A High Court judge has described a father allowing his defenceless four-year-old son to be subjected to a “frightening” campaign of physical abuse and misreporting the boy’s “catastrophic” fatal injuries as having been caused by a fall from a bunk bed as a “shameful betrayal” of the child.
Passing sentence on the man on Friday at the Central Criminal Court, Mr Justice Paul McDermott said the defendant bears a very high level of criminal responsibility for failing to nurture and protect his son.
The judge highlighted that there was a “callousness” in how the child was treated by his father and said the defendant’s “deliberate disregard” for his son’s welfare was “extremely difficult to understand”.
Mr Justice McDermott said the aggravating features of the offending was the age of the victim and described him to the court as “a small, defenceless four-year-old little boy” who had been “isolated in a continuously frightening situation”.
The child was found at a house in the southwest of the country on March 13, 2021. He died three days later in hospital on March 16 in Dublin. A post-mortem report revealed that the boy’s cause of death was traumatic head injury in association with blunt force trauma to the abdomen.
The man’s co-accused and former partner had pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of the boy but this was not acceptable to the Director of Public Prosecutions. A date had not yet been fixed for the woman’s trial.
The 35-year-old defendant, who cannot be named for legal reasons, pleaded guilty last March to charges of endangerment, neglect and impeding the apprehension of the person who he knew or believed to have murdered the child.
Mr Justice McDermott on Friday sentenced the man to seven years in prison for assisting an offender and another seven years for endangerment of the child. He was also jailed for five years each on two counts of child cruelty.
The man’s sentences are to run concurrently and were backdated to March 2021.
The judge said on Friday he was satisfied that there was “a clear and disturbing pattern of abuse” of the child, of which the boy’s father was aware. He said the defendant had played a significant part in not only “hiding” the child but also minimising those injuries.
He said the child was subjected to “frightening forms of chastising and assault” as well as being isolated from members of the family. He said outsiders were not allowed access to the boy so they could not see his injuries.
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He said the defendant tolerated, knew and allowed his son to be subjected to the abuse “culminating in his child’s death”.
Mr Justice McDermott said the defendant’s protection of his then partner from the consequence of what she did and his protection of his own behaviour and inaction was part of the story of this “very sad case”. “The assaults on the child which he tolerated and the treatment of the child are of the most appalling kind,” he continued.
The judge said those who were interviewed by gardaà had described the boy as a typical four-year-old who was “into everything” including playing and wrestling. He said the boy was a “good mixer” with other children, didn’t find it difficult to talk and was “a happy, cheery little boy”.
Prosecuting lawyers today highlighted that the father, who has a previous conviction for violent disorder, initially told gardaà that his son had been “perfectly normal” when he left for work that morning and gave an inaccurate account of events in five out of six interviews with detectives.
The defendant’s barrister, Brian McInerney SC alongside Maria Brosnan BL, told the court that his client had instructed him to “publicly state that he is ashamed of himself”.
The judge commented on Friday that the boy, who slept in a steel framed bunk bed, was not provided with a ladder to access his upper bunk. He also said the boy did not have sheets or a duvet on his bunk bed. In a nearby bedside locker, gardaà found various remedies for pain including hot and cold packs, Arnica cream and steri strips. A waste bin in the bedroom contained an empty tube of Arnica cream.
Mr Justice McDermott said he had received “a detailed and heart-wrenching” victim impact statement from the child’s mother.
The boy’s mother had previously described holding her son in her arms as his life support machine was turned off.Â
The woman, who gave a victim impact statement at the man’s sentence hearing last July, said that even at four years of age her “beautiful brown-eyed boy” “had so much potential” and she could not wait to watch him grow but his life had been “robbed” from him.
The mother said when she walked into the hospital room that day her “beautiful little child” was “hooked up to all wires”. “His little head was 10 times bigger than normal, it was that swollen and he was black and blue,” she told the Central Criminal Court.
The woman said on the day of her son’s funeral the boy’s father had stood up “in Holy God’s house and told everyone how much he loved [the boy] and that [the boy] was a superhero”. “How could he?” she asked.
Paramedics and hospital staff had noted extensive old and new bruising all over the boy’s body including around his eyes and ears. When asked by doctors how the boy had sustained the bruising, the defendant said his son, who he claimed was “clumsy” and “hyperactive”, had fallen into a door two weeks previously.
The court was told medical staff in the hospital were of the view that the bruising was the result “of a non-accidental injury”.
The man had pleaded guilty to reporting the cause of his son’s injuries as an accidental fall to a garda station in the southwest of the country, with intent to impede the apprehension or prosecution of another person, knowing or believing them to be guilty of murdering the child or some other arrestable offence, on March 24, 2021.
He had also pleaded guilty to intentionally or recklessly endangering the child, by causing or permitting him to be placed or left in a situation that created a substantial risk to him of being a victim of serious harm, while being a person who had authority or control over the child, on March 13, 2021.
The defendant had further pleaded guilty to wilfully causing or procuring or allowing the child to be assaulted in a manner likely to cause him unnecessary suffering or injury to his health or seriously to affect his wellbeing, while being a person having custody, charge or care of the child, between March 6 and 12, 2021.
In addition, the man had also pleaded guilty to wilfully neglecting the child in a manner likely to cause him unnecessary suffering or injury to his health or seriously to affect his wellbeing by failing to provide adequate medical aid to him, while being a person having custody, charge or care of the child, on March 13, 2021.
