Librarian's attackers jailed for three months
Two men who assaulted a librarian on Grafton Street in Dublin were today sent to prison for three months.
Stephen Nugent, 24, and Dermot Cooper, 29, pleaded guilty in June to the attack on Barry Duggan, now 37, which left him with a broken jaw, a fractured skull and severe traumatic brain injury.
Dressed in dark suits, the two men stood impassively as Judge Donagh McDonagh told them the crime was too serious to deal with with a non-custodial sentence.
But he said he did not want to destroy the lives of the young men, and suspended two years and nine months of a three-year sentence imposed on each.
Earlier the Court heard how Nugent, a tennis coach from St Werburgh’s in Swords, and Cooper, a recently qualified UCD student from Fosterbrook, Stilloragan, had been returning from a night in Q Bar when they saw Mr Duggan fall off his bicycle.
They sniggered at him before moving on but eye witnesses said Mr Duggan followed and hit Cooper’s brother Sean on the back of his head with his hand.
A scuffle then broke out, and after what was described as a brief hiatus, it resumed in a laneway off Grafton Street.
The court heard during the assault, Duggan received a number of blows both from the fist and the foot and fell to the ground on his head with a cracking sound.
After the attack, the victim was in intensive care for almost two weeks and has suffered high levels of anxiety and fatigue, has difficulty remembering names and can no longer really read.
The judge said: “This is not a case I feel I can deal with by a non-custodial sentence.
“Mr Duggan suffered serious and indeed life-threatening injuries and remained comatose for a long period of time.”
Judge McDonagh said he gave the men credit for entering an early plea of guilty to the assault but said he was not impressed that they had gone to the gardaí to admit their part in the incident the following day.
He said that while they had saved the gardaí time investigating the case, he said they had arrived with carefully prepared statements, which he described as self-serving.
He also said he could not understand that three men might be in fear of their safety from one small victim.
“It would require me to suspend belief if I was to accept that these three men were in any way threatened or intimidated by Mr Duggan.
“The demeanour of the accused as they ran away is not that of people who were threatened,” he said.
The judge said CCTV evidence clearly showed the men had carried out a celebratory jump and a punch in the air following the attack.
But he acknowledged that the pair had compensated the victim, which showed that they were not only contrite, but prepared to face what they had done up front.
Mr Duggan made no comment as he left the court.
