The manslaughter of a violent but unarmed intruder.

We don't know, is the short answer, because jury deliberations are confidential.

Plus, all of the media reports that I get from a quick google are of the sentencing phase of the trial, where the evidence put to the jury is only summarised. We don't know the full evidence the jury considered.

For example, where and at what point did the stabbing happen? Did the defendant stab the assailant while, e.g., the assailant's hands were round his throat? Or had the fighting stopped at that point? Was the assailant trying to leave when he was stabbed? Did the defendant follow him outside and stab him there? We don't know the answers to any of those questions. The jury will have heard evidence on issues like that. We don't know what that evidence was, and we don't know what they made of that evidence.

Had I been in the jury, I would have been troubled by the presence of a kitchen knife in the bedroom.

If the stabbing had occurred in the kitchen it would be reasonable to pick up a kitchen knife in self defence.

Not so reasonable if the knife was already in the bedroom in the expectation of an attack.

Their attitude essentially strips away any basic human entitlement to self defence. When someone attacks, the man or woman defending will do what is needed to stop the attack. A careful effort to avoid excessive harm would mean the attack continues, or really is impossible. Go to prison if the attacker is killed, or they will try their hardest to see that happening.

He wasn't out free. He was remanded in custody after conviction last July, pending sentencing.

It is a story about the sentencing hearing of the case. it only includes a summary of the case to that point. you would need to look for reports of the trial stage.

I’d disagree. If an intruder forces his way into a property and then a bedroom in the early hours of the morning….. It’s reasonable to presume that there will be people there, sleeping… and it’s reasonable to assume he will do people harm in order to meet his goals of escape. He used force to access the property and would have used it against people if required to exit / rob them.

It’s not like the guy sneaked into the kitchen, robbed a box of petty cash whatever and was chased for a kilometre and stabbed.

he chose to enter a their sleeping quarters, a bedroom, a with a person asleep…and he paid the price. If he had done the same here, the same result all be it by slightly different method of defence would have materialised.

goes to show people how abjectly cretinous and useless these judges of ours are. Totally divorced from reality. No understanding or interest in fairness… the criminals are almost seen as some sort of victim, criminalising and jailing people for defending their homes themselves and families … it really is becoming a poxy hell hole of a country….

Well, the knife was taken from the bedroom, and at 3.30 am my presumption was that is where people were.

I think this is the part of the story that was not believed by the judge.

They can store recordings and replay them on the TV and on the internet. You saw a recording of him walking on a street, that's in the past but in present time he's in gaol.

Likewise, if someone kills another, they face the consequences.

That’s incorrect. The DPP can charge someone with manslaughter rather than murder. It’s pretty rare but it has happened. Such cases are prosecuted in the Circuit Court rather than the Central Criminal Court

Would that even be cynicism?

You could if you are a cynic.

Personally I prefer to live in a country where the legal system provides representation to those who cannot afford to pay for it themselves.

The days of poor defendants being hauled up before the "beak" and summarily dealt with are gone forever and that's a good thing.

Before you start trying to dispense legal advice, you'd be better off putting some effort into practicing learning how to read properly.

In a case where one person stabbed another person to death and admitted to it, the correct charge was murder. The DPP does not decide upon guilt. That is for the Court to determine. All of the ingredients of murder were plausibly there. Therefore the correct charge was murder.

Section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act:

If you manage to read that far, it says, in another way, that if you kill someone you are presumed to have intended to kill the person. You can rebut that (i.e. prove otherwise). Killing someone with intention is murder. You will be given a chance to rebut that in court. Not at the DPP stage. A killing may be found lawful in self-defence. But again, let the Court decide that

Not sure why where the knife was should/would have mattered. Keeping a weapon in a bed room because of a fear of attack is not totally unreasonable. I am sure he is not the only person on this island who does that. Some people might even have a knife in bed because they were eating something in bed that needed a knife.

But at the end of the day, the Jury had the power to find for self defense if they wanted, but they did not.

If the defendant raises self-defence as a defence to the charge, the burden of proof his on the defendant. He has to produce evidence showing that he acted in self-defence. In general, the same goes for any other defence that a defendant may rely on in relation to any charge.

There's two issues:

First, court reports tell you what went on in the courtroom on the day that they are reporting on. They stick to this because they enjoy legal protection from e.g. defamation actions if they report strictly what was said at the day's hearing. So a court report of sentencing proceedings tells you want was said and done at the sentencing proceedings. If you want to read what was said and done at the trial, which was several months ago, you'd need to go back and find and read court reports published each day during the trial.

Secondly, journalism is expensive. Newspaper revenue streams have been badly hit by declining circulation and declining advertising income. So they employ fewer journalists. You need stuff to put on the pages to go between the ads, but it's much cheaper to fill that space with opinion pieces, infotainment, press releases and agency feeds than to employ professional journalists to actually go out and write stories. To run a court report you have to pay a professional journalist to sit in court, all day, to produce just a few column-inches of just one story. When revenue streams were fat serious newspapers could and did do that, but now they have to make choices about how much journalism to pay for, and where to deploy their increasingly scarce journalistic resources. The result is significantly less court reporting than there used to be.

(I don't know if this case was the subject of daily court reports each day during the trial. But many cases are not.)

Even if they are 6 years old?

A Garda with a search warrant?

A paramedic or fire fighter?

because of this part

there is a further provision which requires that the reaction to the intruder is such that another reasonable person in the same circumstances would likely employ.

The jury did not believe that his reaction was reasonable.

the jury heard all of the evidence. you haven't.