A DUBLIN man has been sentenced to 15 years in jail for a crime he committed when he was 16 years of age after pleading guilty to a charge of sexual assault of a woman with intent of degradation.
The court heard he had a role in trying to make a female college student have sex with her male housemates after breaking into their home with a hammer and hacksaw.
Jason Paget had just turned 16 when he and Stephen Phelan (26) broke into the Dublin home, threatened the three occupants for their ATM cards and personal identification numbers and ordered the woman to have sex with her housemates after she had been made to strip naked.
Paget, Aylward Green, Finglas, was extradited back to Ireland last year after he left for Britain in 2003.
He pleaded guilty at the Central Criminal Court to aggravated burglary on St Alban’s Road and aggravated burglary and sexual assault of a woman with intent to cause degradation at another Dublin address, all on February 11th, 2003. He has no previous convictions.
Phelan, Poddle Close, Crumlin, previously had his nine-year sentence for these and other serious crimes, including a vicious knife attack, increased to 13 years on a DPP appeal to the Court of Criminal Appeal.
Mr Justice Paul Carney declared Paget a sex offender. He said the “voluntary use of drugs” and a dysfunctional background offered him no mitigation. He said “the criminality and viciousness of the offence had already been measured by the Court of Criminal Appeal”.
Mr Justice Carney suspended the final five years having taken into account the Garda evidence that Paget was not the ringleader, his lack of previous convictions, his genuine remorse and his good behaviour since the offence.
Mr Justice Carney ordered that Paget should never have any contact with the victims in the case and he ordered him to undergo five years of post-release supervision.
Det Garda Sgt Joe McLoughlin said Phelan, who had 26 previous convictions at the time of the offence, was the main aggressor in the burglaries and sex assault and had cut the female victim on her back from shoulder to waistline.
John Aylmer SC, defending Paget, asked Mr Justice Carney to take into account his client’s remorse, his guilty plea and the fact he has been of good behaviour since the incidents, despite being “unlawfully at large”.
Det Garda Sgt McLoughlin told Isobel Kennedy SC, prosecuting, that Phelan and Paget, who was armed with a wheel brace, broke into the first house at about 4.30am, threatened to “knife” the three male occupants, ordered them into the kitchen and ransacked the home. The pair took a €300 mini-disc player, a laptop worth €750, a games console and €300 of games in the raid, which lasted between 30 minutes to an hour.
Some hours later, a male occupant in the second premises awoke to find an intruder with a Stanley knife in his room and another man in the doorway of his female housemate’s bedroom. All three housemates were brought into one bedroom while Phelan searched the house and Paget stood with a hammer and hacksaw.
During the ordeal, which lasted nearly two hours, Phelan threatened to cut off the woman’s nipples if she did not lie on a bed with her arms outstretched. Both ordered her to remove her clothes and she eventually stripped to her underpants, which Phelan cut at the hips so they fell off.
He then brought one of her housemates into the room naked and said he wanted the two of them to have sex. The woman was brought into the other housemate’s room a short time later, where Phelan ordered this second man to have sex with her.
The man and woman, out of fear, began kissing to make it look like they were having sex.
Det Garda Sgt McLoughlin told Ms Kennedy that Phelan cut the woman on her back and buttock during this incident but was called away by Paget, who was not in the room at that point.