A primary school teacher who mounted a campaign of "vitriolic" harassment against two people, writing hundreds of letters in which she used racist slurs and falsely alleged that a care worker was abusing patients, has failed to convince the Court of Appeal that her two-year jail term was too severe.
“The actions were carefully and comprehensively premeditated and appear to have involved a campaign to disrupt and potentially ruin every aspect” of the victims’ lives, said Mr Justice Brian O’Moore on Thursday, in dismissing Eimear Carroll’s appeal.
Carroll (42), of Hillside, Seffin, Birr, Offaly, pleaded guilty to one count of harassment and two counts of sending by post an article which is obscene, grossly offensive, or menacing.
She was sentenced to four years with the final two years suspended last July by Judge Catherine Staines at Clonmel Courthouse.
It was the State’s case that she sent approximately 500 letters in total to the victims’ family, friends and place of work, including letters to HIQA alleging that one injured party had caused abuse both physical and verbal in the context of her employment.
At Carroll’s appeal hearing last November, Mr Justice John Edwards raised concerns over the racist element in the harassment, as Carroll repeatedly referred to one of the injured parties as "a knacker" in the letters she sent.
“The reference to a ‘knacker’ is a pejorative term to describe Travellers, it’s a racist slur,” said the judge said, noting that the appellant had written that “everyone knows that she and her whole family are big-nosed knackers”.
The Court of Appeal today dismissed Carroll’s appeal, holding that given the “numerous and aggravating” aspects of the case, the trial judge had made no error in fixing a headline sentence of six years.
In dismissing Carroll’s appeal, Mr Justice O’Moore said the effect of her “vicious” correspondence had been “devastating” to the injured parties.
He said no element of one of the injured party’s life was “left untouched” by Ms Carroll’s “campaign of harassment” with correspondence sent to her employer, her friends and the victim herself.
In addition, he noted that the second injured party’s parents were also subjected to “these profoundly unpleasant letters”.
He said the fact that information personal to the victims was deployed in correspondence had the effect of “sowing doubt” in their minds as to whether a close friend was “behind all this”. Both parties’ lost friends who “naturally resented having this distressing correspondence sent to them on a regular basis,” the judge said.
Mr Justice O’Moore said the sentencing judge was correct to emphasis the “extraordinary” fact that the injured parties had to move to a different county to escape some of the effects of “this vitriolic campaign”.
He said the argument that Carroll’s actions should be treated less seriously because they did not involve personal confrontation or the use of social media was “unconvincing”.
The range of the persons to whom the letters were sent, their frequency, and the period over which the correspondence persisted meant that the harassment was “every bit” as effective as if social media had been employed, the judge noted.
He said the court found no error on the part of the sentencing judge in her identification of the mitigating factors - including Carroll’s low risk of reoffending, her apology and lack of previous offending - or the extent to which these should reduce the headline sentence.
The decision of the judge to suspend two years of the sentence was ultimately not something challenged by Carroll, Mr Justice O'Moore said, and accordingly he dismissed the appeal.
Launching an appeal against the severity of the sentence last November, Dermot Cahill SC, for Carroll, said the trial judge erred by placing the harassment offence at the high end of the scale, setting a headline sentence of six years.
Mr Cahill said that there was no actual threat made, while these acts were carried out by a person with psychological problems. He said Carroll, who was a primary school teacher, “went down a road she should never have gone down” due to her illness.
Counsel for the DPP, David Humphries BL, said that the impact on the injured party was quite significant, as the harassment involved the use of personal details. He said this included a reference to the death of a relation, in which the appellant said the injured party had continued to work “while the body of her cousin was not cold in the ground”.
Mr Humphries said this was the basis for the sentencing judge to assess the offending in the top range. He told the court that the injured party worked with vulnerable families, and because of letters sent by the appellant there were investigations into her fitness to practise her work.
He went on to point out that this was persistent harassment over a two-year period, with letters sent on a weekly basis accusing the injured party of spreading sexual diseases, as well as letters sent to HIQA alleging the abuse of patients.
