Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

The proposal in this group of amendments is to establish a register of sentences in criminal cases. The establishment of such a register would require the case number, the offence, the particulars of the offence and any mitigating factors relied on by the convicted person or his defence counsel, as well as other details, to be noted. It would be an enormously difficult task for a person to take a note of two or three hours of evidence, as would be the case in a serious trial. Somebody would have to register all that information.

Regarding the convicted person's previous convictions, if any, that would be complex but not impossible to do. Subsequently, updated information would have to come from the prison service and the Courts Service about whatever happened, say, if the person was granted early release, whether the person had their sentence remitted or whatever. That would be a useful exercise but my problem is who would do it? If this were to be done in every case, and this applies to every case, we would have a massive workload because to put out the material in subsection (2) in every case that came before the courts would take two or three hours to check to ensure it was right, take all the notes of what happened in court and so on. It would take a lot of time to put that material in place.

To give an example, if somebody was up for shoplifting and their case was dealt with in the District Court, we would have to have somebody in the District Court — a garda or a court official — who would take a careful note of what was said on behalf of the accused as to the reason the man or woman in question should not be sentenced to jail for shoplifting. Psychiatric or psychological evidence could be given or poverty issues could be put forward. If all that was to be registered, it would be a hefty task.

I agree with the Fine Gael proposal in the sense that it would be welcome to know this information in every case and to be able to say that out of 10,000 shoplifting cases, the average sentence is one month, a €50 fine or, in 80% of cases on a first offence, the probation Act is applied having regard to exculpatory or various mitigating evidence given by the accused. That is a world of perfection, however, which does not exist in reality. To have the apparatus in place that would give this register the input it needs in the District Court in Newcastle West, New Ross or in the Circuit Court in Enniscorthy, Wexford or wherever would be hugely costly and there are not people whose job it is to do it. Either gardaí or court officials would have to do it, but whichever of them had to do it, it would be a massive imposition on the courts system.

I do not want to be destructive. The idea is good in principle. It would be a good idea to have researchers go to our courts and do a study on the way the Judiciary deals with, say, shoplifting cases. They could take 100 shoplifting cases at random and get the Courts Service to co-operate with that and indicate what happened in each of them. A criminologist could go to court and see what happened in those cases to determine if there was a pattern. I could see that having some merit. Likewise, in rape cases which are dealt with in the Central Criminal Court, there should be no problem about having a researcher examine them to determine the average sentence and to put material into a study based on the age of the accused, mitigating circumstances or whatever.

Whatever about the practicality of those studies, and they would be difficult enough, this universal system which would require input from the Garda, the Courts Service and the prison service to keep the register up to date and effective, is something the current bureaucracy cannot take on at this stage. I could not resource it and if I had the resources for that, people would argue they would be better invested in the probation and welfare service or something more useful.