The Court of Appeal will decide after Christmas whether or not to impose life sentences in two separate cases of young men who were teenagers when they committed murders.
The men who were aged 14 and 17 when they committed the murders in January 2021 and January 2020, were each separately sentenced to life in prison with a review after 13 years.
They have to be resentenced, after the Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that the sentencing court does not have the power to review the detention of a child convicted of murder.
The Supreme Court also found that children should only be sentenced to life in prison in exceptional circumstances where their intentions and actions can fairly be equated with those of an adult.
The first case to be appealed today involved a boy who was 14 years old when he murdered a woman walking home from work in Dublin's north inner city.
Urantsetseg Tserendorj, 49, was stabbed in the neck near the IFSC in Dublin on January 20 2021, after the boy attempted to rob her.
The knife grazed a main artery in Ms Tserendorj's neck and she died in hospital nine days later.
The boy had threatened a shopkeeper on the same day and showed the knife to another woman 25 minutes after trying to rob Ms Tserendorj.
The boy’s defence counsel, Michael O’Higgins said it had been accepted by the judge in the boy’s trial that there was no intention to kill. Mr O’Higgins said there was a "fleeting intention" by the boy to cause serious injury in the course of an opportunistic robbery.
The boy’s trial and the Appeal Court heard both the boy’s parents were addicted to drugs and he was raised by his grandmother. After an encounter with his birth mother in his teens, the boy’s drug use got much worse and he began using drugs with his mother and his father.
The court heard he tried to rob Ms Tserendorj to get money to buy drugs.
Mr O’Higgins said the Supreme Court ruling had found that the court should start from the position that the sentence to be imposed on a child for murder was unlikely to be life, unless there were "very exceptional" circumstances, including premeditation and adult levels of foresight and planning which were not present in this case.
Prosecuting counsel, Sean Guerin said the Supreme Court had not expressed the view about the appropriateness of a life sentence in this particular case.
He drew the attention of the judges to a previous Court of Appeal ruling which noted that it was an intended attack, with a knife, on a defenceless woman, late at night.
The second case involved a 17-year-old boy who murdered 20-year-old Cameron Blair in Cork in January 2020.
Mr Blair was at a student house party on Bandon Road and was attempting to keep the peace.
The court heard Mr Blair had allowed the boy and two others into the house as they were causing trouble outside. He was described as being very pleasant to them inside and treating them well.
At some stage the boy and his friends armed themselves with knives from the kitchen. The 17-year-old went to get alcohol and stabbed Mr Blair at the door of the house when he returned.
His defence counsel, Karl Finnegan said the boy who is now 23 was almost 18 at the time.
But he said he was a child under the law and was not in the same position as an adult. The boy had pleaded guilty at an early stage and had expressed remorse. Mr Finnegan said this was not just to get the case over and done with before he turned 18 and could be tried as an adult.
Mr Finnegan added that there was no premeditation and it was not an exceptional case which would warrant a life sentence.
The court heard the boy had done well in education since his conviction.
He had also written a letter of remorse to Mr Blair’s family. But Prosecuting counsel, Anne Rowland said the family did not wish to receive it.
Ms Rowland said the court should have regard to the fact that the convicted man had armed himself with a large knife, had held it like a dagger and had stabbed Mr Blair with a "deep, powerful, thrust" causing a deep wound.
He had initially denied any involvement but later admitted to gardaí that he had stabbed Mr Blair.
He claimed this was because Mr Blair had engaged in "fisticuffs" with another boy. But CCTV showed this was not the case and that Mr Blair had simply been trying to keep the peace at the party.
Mr Justice John Edwards said the two cases had given the judges a lot to think about and realistically they would not give their rulings until after Christmas.
