A foreign thug who violently raped a teenage Irish woman with a mild intellectual disability on a side-street before falsely imprisoned her in his home, raping her twice more, was given an extraordinarily lenient sentence because he can’t speak English, the State has argued at the Court of Appeal.
At the trial, Detective Garda Adrian Fehily told Éilis Brennan SC, prosecuting, that the offences took place in a town in the west of Ireland in the early hours of February 4, 2018.
The Irish Times reports that Costel Pirvu (39) formerly with an address in a town in the west of Ireland, was found guilty of three counts of rape and one of false imprisonment after a nine-day trial at the Central Criminal Court last year. He had pleaded not guilty on all counts and was jailed for six and a half years.
At the Court of Appeal today, Ms Brennan, acting on behalf of the state, submitted that the sentence Pirvu received had been unduly lenient.
The Mirror reported that Counsel argued that Pirvu had unduly benefited in mitigation because the trial judge had factored in his status as a foreign national with no English.
Ms Brennan said the trial judge said every day in prison for Pirvu would be like a day and a half for an English-speaking person.
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