AN ELDERLY Kilkenny man who repeatedly assaulted nine young girls over a 21-year period has had his sentence more than doubled following an appeal by the DPP.
The Court of Criminal Appeal yesterday imposed a 10-year sentence on Edwin Curry (64), having found that his original four-year sentence was “unduly lenient” and a “substantial departure” from the norm.
Presiding judge Mr Justice Donal O’Donnell, sitting with Mr Justice Paul Gilligan and Mr Justice Bryan McMahon, said the abuse perpetrated by Curry was “exceptionally depraved” and he posed a risk of reoffending.
In January last year, Judge Olive Buttimer sentenced Curry to four years’ imprisonment after he was found guilty of 146 counts of indecent assault by a Kilkenny Circuit Court jury.
Curry, who is from Kilkenny city, had denied 146 counts of repeatedly assaulting five girls aged as young as five from 1964 to 1985. He had pleaded guilty to 43 counts of sexual assault against four other complainants over the same period.
Counsel for the State Patrick Treacy had argued that a four-year sentence was “wholly and unduly lenient” for “perhaps the most prolonged and numerous” case of sexual assault “ever to come before an Irish court”.
He said it was a “hard concrete fact” that the 189 counts on the indictment carried a theoretical sentence of 378 years, and asked the court to consider whether it was commensurate with current social mores for Curry to be sentenced to just four years.
Mr Treacy said the nature of the abuse was a particular aggravating factor in that it involved elements of exhibitionism, photography and the keeping of a diary.
He said Curry had systematically abused his victims, using enticements such as money, sweets and kittens to lure them to a shed behind his parent’s house.
Mr Treacy said some of the victims shared common symptoms as a result of the abuse such as depression, difficulties in maintaining intimacy with their partners and an identity as a “child prostitute”. Curry had never expressed any remorse and had aggravated matters by claiming in the witness box that one of the complainants had a “vulture syndrome”.
Counsel for the respondent John Peart SC told the court the sentencing judge had considered that the accused was “a kind of recluse” who “never did any harm to anyone” beyond the offences before the court.
He said the fact that Curry had been subjected to a severe punishment beating, where his blood was daubed on the walls of his house and he was left with a fractured skull, cast a light on the case that “one would not normally see”.
In a letter to the court his client wished to “humbly ask” the assembled judges not to interfere in his sentence as he believed the sentencing judge had considered all that had happened to him.
Mr Peart said in his letter Curry expressed his “sincere remorse for the hurt I have caused to all these people”.