CRIMINAL CASE NO. 23 OF 2012
COURT: I have to sentence you on your plea of guilty for the offence of rape. The victim was a 40 year old woman and even though you may not have known it at the time, she suffered from mental illness.
You yourself at the time in question had been drinking and I accept the submissions made by your counsel about you being an alcoholic and having a drink problem.
It is the fact that due to the lady’s mental illness she makes no statement that appears in the committal bundle. The evidence that is against you really comes from you. If you had not been frank with the police it may have been difficult to prosecute you on the evidence of just those who witnessed the matter. One of the advantages of pleading guilty, beyond the discount that you have, is that you have not spent your creditability seeking to lie your way out of your guilt.
Accordingly, I will act on the basis of your version of the facts as you told to the police and as is repeated to me by your counsel today, namely that you had sat next to the lady in question and had some physical intimacy with her apparent consent, or at least without any violent objection.
However, the fact is that after you parted, you went to buy more drink, you came back to her and she was then in a condition which we use the word “unconscious” to describe. The exact mechanics of what caused that condition, whether it be drink, her mental state, a combination of both, is unknown to us. But that does not really matter because the mischief of your conduct was that you took advantage of the state she was in.
You very frankly said to the police that you proceeded without any thought of whether or not she would consent to you having sexual intercourse with her. You put the urgency of your desire beyond any thought of her. It was clearly reckless behaviour.
It is the fact that there is no victim impact statement and I am not going to adjourn the case to have one. The complications of trying to work out what are the effects of mental illness and what are the effects of the rape are just beyond the scope of a criminal court when it comes to the court exercising its powers of sentence in a case like this.
Even though the facts are unusual in your case, the mischief is quite a common one; it is of men taking advantage of women who are not in a position to defend themselves. That is the main mischief here. It is also added to by the fact that you did not use a condom. In those circumstances starting points of imprisonment after trial range from between 6 to 7 years.
In your case I am going to take a figure at the bottom of that bracket as a starting point. And in particular in the case I do give you real credit for the frankness you have displayed and your obvious remorse and repentance. It is worthy of remark that an unscrupulous man may well not have made the admissions you made which lead to your conviction. Or that if such an unscrupulous man had done so he would have contested a trial on the basis that the police misbehaved in some way in order to procure the admission.
That course probably occurred to you, you rejected it and did not take it. You entered an honest plea of guilty and will get real credit for it.
So in the circumstances of this case I shall take a 6 year starting point. I will give you a one-third discount for your plea of guilty and the sentence upon you is one of 4 years’ imprisonment.