CRIMINAL CASE NO. 428 OF 2010
COURT: I have to sentence you on your plea of guilty for the offence of rape.
You are a 52-year-old man. The girl you raped was 22. She was the girlfriend of your son. Circumstances had resulted in you being alone with her at your home in August of last year, and the facts clearly indicated that you formed a strong sexual desire for her. You forced yourself upon her. You did use violence, but no more violence than was necessary to achieve your desire.
The matter did not take very long. A telephone call to a mobile telephone interrupted matters.
You were arrested, and made immediate admissions to the police, and you entered your plea of guilty, in your circumstances, at the earliest opportunity. From a variety of sources I can see that you have expressed true regret, and I will treat you as being genuinely remorseful.
No condom was used, and it is the fact that the girl was pregnant. She has subsequently had the child. That is something of which you claim to have been not aware. There is nothing to make me doubt for sure that assertion.
One of the advantages of pleading guilty is that you do not spend your credibility seeming to lie your way out of trouble, so I will accept the assertion that is made in this regard on your behalf.
Your counsel points to a general lack of aggravating features concerning the commission of the offence itself, and I accept what he says, for the most part. What I do regard as an aggravation is the fact that whilst you were not in any position of particular trust towards the victim, it happened in the context of, in effect, a family. Any rape causes those associated with it and the victim of it pain, but that is amplified where the offence takes place against a domestic background such as this.
The unusual fact of your case which I come to now is that you are a long-term schizophrenic. You have been suffering from paranoid schizophrenia since 1985. You work in a sheltered context.
The first thing to be said in this regard is that this is not a case where voices or delusions or hallucination lie behind your criminal conduct. In those cases where it does, then the mental condition obviously can relieve the defendant of a substantial amount of responsibility for his conduct. You very frankly have told the psychiatrists that you knew you were doing wrong.
However, the condition does provide you with grounds for some lesser mitigation, and this is to be found towards the end of the report of Dr Sylvia Chan. The report was dated 10 June. She tells us there that it is a feature of schizophrenia that those who suffer from it develop sometimes a single-mindedness about any topic that might start to trouble them, and that clearly is what happened here with your desire for the victim.
The second feature that she mentions is a lack of stability, especially towards the end of the medication cycle, which you were at at the time, when she speaks of a lack of some inhibition and a lack of control in impulse.
No one can say for sure what effect these considerations had on your criminal conduct, though their existence does afford you grounds for mitigating what would otherwise be a nasty offence.
It seems to me that those matters of aggravation that I have mentioned are balanced by those matters of mitigation which I have just rehearsed.
I shall take a starting point of 6 years’ imprisonment. I shall reduce that by a third because of your plea of guilty.
The sentence is thus one of 4 years’ imprisonment.
That is designed to punish you and acknowledge the seriousness of the crime you committed. It is also designed to reflect a remorseful plea of guilty from a man who does suffer from some enduring and chronic mental illness.