THE MINISTER FOR Justice has said that character reference letters submitted by TDs for sentencing hearings in court cases are “inappropriate”. 

Jim O’Callaghan said he believes that anyone wishing to give evidence in a sentence hearing should do so in person and be subject to cross-examination. 

It comes after a Court of Appeal judge refused to reveal the identity of a former TD who provided a character reference on behalf of a one-time government advisor convicted of sexually exploiting a 13-year-old boy at a Christian children’s camp.

At an appeal hearing last week, Mr Justice John Edwards noted that not a “single one” of those who provided a reference for Daniel Ramamoorthy (40) mentioned the victim or the “vile nature” of his crime.

Refusing an application made by the Irish Times for access the references, the judge said a large number of references had been provided and the court had accurately summarised the effect of these which was that they “speak to the previous pro social conduct” on the appellant’s part.

He said that beyond that, there was nothing in them that required to be disclosed.

When asked about his opinion on the case today, O’Callaghan said he was not going to “dictate how a court should do its business”.

However, he said: “My own view is that letters sent in for sentencing hearings by TDs, not only are they pointless, but in general, they’re inappropriate.

“If somebody wants to give evidence in respect of a sentencing hearing, they should attend and give that evidence and be subject to cross-examination.”

O’Callaghan said sentencing is “a very complex job” for a court.

“Not only are they sentencing the offence, but they’re also sentencing the offender. They have to know the detail about the offender: is it the first offence? Is this out of sync with what they’ve done previously?

“There’s complexity to that, and I can understand why the court would want to get information about the general background of an offender, but that shouldn’t be done just in a haphazard way by a TD writing it a letter.”

Law change

Character references are submitted after a guilty verdict or plea but before a judge’s sentencing. They are offered as possible mitigation.

In 2024, then-president Michael D Higgins signed the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences and Human Trafficking) Bill 2023 into law, which reformed the system of character references.

It meant that a person submitting a character reference must now do so under oath or affidavit. 

“This means that the person who provides the character reference can be cross examined if necessary,” former justice minister Helen McEntee said on introducing the bill.

The bill was first introduced by Fine Gael MEP Regina Doherty in 2022 and co-sponsored by former Fianna Fáil TD Lisa Chambers and former Green Party senator Pauline O’Reilly.

Speaking on RTÉ’s Drivetime programme yesterday, Doherty said the politicians wanted to ban the references completely but received “a lot of pushback from the legal profession on the basis of people are entitled to show mitigating circumstances”. 

“The concerns that were raised was that everybody is entitled to a defence,” she said. “We kind of felt that that was nonsense. You’d already been convicted. This was now just about sentencing the crime.”

But she said there were “powerful and persuasive” arguments made of objective reasons as to why somebody should be able to bring forward information that might influence the judge.

Doherty said the “main aim” they had was to stop the re-traumatisation of victims of sexual crimes and to make those giving the references “think twice about it, that you would be or could be cross-examined, that this just isn’t the little letter that’s going to go on somebody’s file, that you have to stand up in open court and actually be able to stand over what it is that you were going to say about the person who had now been found guilty of a sexual violent crime.”

Human rights lawyer and former Dublin Rape Crisis Centre CEO Noeline Blackwell, who worked on the bill with Doherty, told the same programme that it would be “a tall order” to get rid of the references entirely, but that it did not mean it shouldn’t be done.

“Whenever anyone would express concern about sheets of references going in for somebody who has just been convicted of a crime, lawyers would say ‘oh, the judges don’t really take any notice of them’,” Blackwell said.

“And the question I was never able to get a straight answer to – and I still don’t think I will get a straight answer to it – is if the judges are taking so little notice of them, why is everyone going to the trouble of producing them?”.