Director of Public Prosecutions -v- Crowley [2021] IECA 178 June 24, 2021, at paragraphs 63 to 66:
To put it in very general terms, a court’s obligation is to ensure that victims are properly acknowledged as having a legitimate interest in the proceedings, and that they are treated with respect within the process. Moreover, there is a statutory requirement to facilitate them in being heard, if they wish to be heard, concerning the effects of the crime upon them, and to take that evidence into account in assessing the gravity of the offending conduct.
However, in so far as victims have an entitlement to see justice done, that entitlement inures to them not as individuals but rather as members of society. The court’s obligation to do justice at sentencing is owed, firstly, to the public at large, including the victims in the case; and secondly to the accused who has an individual constitutional right to expect and receive a sentence that is proportionate (in the distributive sense) to the gravity of the crime as committed by him in his personal circumstances
The right of an accused to receive such a proportionate sentence was recognized in the case of State (Healy) v O’Donoghue [1976] I.R. 1 as being an aspect of the right of every citizen to a trial in due course of law as guaranteed under Article 37 of the
Constitution.
However, as the law presently stands, the victim of a crime has no entitlement to expect that a sentence will be crafted to provide individual justice for her.
The role of the victim in the sentencing process, and indeed in the Irish criminal justice system generally, is an important one but it is sometimes misunderstood. Unlike in civil litigation where an injured person can directly sue the person who has done them wrong and can seek individual redress for the wrong done to them, our criminal justice system does not allow a victim to either initiate or prosecute criminal proceedings, nor to seek individual redress, as a party to those proceedings. Criminal cases are brought by the Director of Public Prosecutions on behalf of society (of which individual victims are of course members) and in the name of the people of Ireland, rather than on behalf of individual victims.
There are good legal and constitutional policy reasons for this. Criminal penalties are not meant to be retaliatory or restitutive either at the behest of, or on behalf of, an individual. On the contrary, it is for the courts to punish the offender appropriately on behalf of society, rather than on behalf of any individual, and the objectives of the selected punishment as generally understood may include retribution, deprecation, deterrence, incapacitation, reform/rehabilitation, and restitution, or some combination of those objectives. In the People (Director of Public Prosecutions v M.S., [2000] I.R. 592 Denham J., phrasing it slightly differently, suggested that the objectives of sentencing included retribution, deterrence, protection of society, reparation and rehabilitation. Ultimately, as the renowned sentencing scholar, Thomas O’Malley, puts it (in Sentencing Law and Practice, 3rd ed, para 10-03), whatever objectives are being pursued, “penalties imposed on those convicted were (and are) supposed to reflect a rational and dispassionate assessment of the offender’s culpability and other relevant circumstances”.
