View/Open - CORA - University College Cork

Criminal Appeal, which were the courts which previously had used the Butler Order.
There was no evidence at all of the use of a Butler Order in the District Court so the
question did not arise in that jurisdiction. Some of the judges had presided in the criminal
courts before the Finn case and those judges in particular were of interest on the topic to
discern if they had abandoned such practices. Two of these judges identified the
intensified use of the part suspended sentence as a replacement for the reviewable
sentence. In their view, the part suspended sentence allowed for a continuation of
supervision of the offenders’ behaviour through the Probation Service as the monitoring
agency. Theystated:
“…In the days when we hadpower to reviewour judgment or decisions when you
would say “I am sentencing you to 5 years in prison but I will review this in 2
years” and then if you are told that everything is going well you would come to the
conclusion (to suspend). But nowthat we are not allowed to do that, that’s really
where the part suspended sentences come in.”A3J1CC
“Now, the review of sentence was found to be impermissible and then low and
behold, what came out of the woodwork after that was the partially suspended
sentence which previous to that was never used. The partiallysuspended sentence
is nowgiven statutorybackingso we have made that much progress.” A5J1CC
Another judge of the Circuit Criminal Court reflected upon the former widespread use of
the reviewable sentence as follows:
“…it’s an anathema to me…I actuallythink that it was nearlygetting into disrepute
here back in the early days before the Finn decision. Fellows for a bank or post
office robberythat would normallycarry4 years were being given 8 and were being
reviewedandreviewedwhich is just nonsense in myview”. A7J3CC
A judge of the Supreme Court reflected upon the reviewable sentence in the present tense.
He pointed out the monitoring and rehabilitative elements of the procedure may perhaps
obscure punitive anddeterrent considerations in the public mind when he stated:
276