A 40-year-old man who delivered “the final strike” before the death of a man on a stag party in Athlone in 2022 has been jailed for six-and-a-half years.
Seán Munnelly, of Irishtown, Athlone, Co Westmeath, received a sentence of seven years, with the final six months suspended, at Mullingar Circuit Court on Friday for the manslaughter of Paul ‘Babs’ Connolly (48), from Edenderry, Co Offaly.
Connolly died in the early hours of August 13th, 2022, on Church Street after falling on three occasions during a number of physical altercations, involving punches and kicks, with two men: Munnelly, and David Higgins of St Paul’s Terrace, Athlone.
Higgins was previously jailed by Judge Keenan Johnson for one year for assault causing harm to Connolly and engaging in violent disorder.
Sentencing at Mullingar Circuit Criminal Court on Friday, Judge Deirdre Browne said the final punch delivered by Munnelly was “unprovoked and entirely unwarranted, very deliberate ... and came out of nowhere”.
She said Munnelly was gesturing towards Connolly, who had earlier become separated from the stag party group, and was speaking in an “animated fashion”.
She said Connolly was in “a very vulnerable” state as by that stage he had fallen twice and was clearly injured. At the sentence hearing earlier in October, video footage was shown where blood could be observed on Connolly’s face.
Browne said a nurse who witnessed the final punch and who attended to Connolly after he fell for the final time, heard Munnelly say, “F**king deserved it, no one pisses me off.”
Garda Kevin Craig also gave evidence at the sentence hearing that Connolly was refused entry to a number of establishments in Athlone earlier on due to his state of intoxication.
Browne said on Friday that after seeing the extensive CCTV footage, she placed Munnelly’s conduct at “a very high level”.
She said that “at all times” during the assaults perpetrated by Higgins and Munnelly, Connolly appeared “vulnerable” and posed “no threat” to them.
Munnelly claimed Connolly made remarks earlier that night in the presence of three other witnesses that he took exception to. Browne said any such remarks were of “minor significance” in the assessment of the offence of unlawful killing.
Browne said that on the CCTV footage from this part of the night, Connolly “lurches, lumbers, is unsteady and appears out of it, not in an aggressive, threatening way, [but] as if he didn’t know what was going on”.
She said that despite the interventions of younger men, an older bystander, and other members of the stag party, Higgins and Munnelly “would not go away”.
Browne did not accept that this was “a one-punch case”, but was one that involved “a final strike” after “a series of assaults” that took place over an “extended period of time”.
Consequently, she placed the offending in the four- to 10-year band of sentencing for unlawful killing.
After setting a headline sentence of eight-and-a-half years, Browne turned to aggravating factors which included that Munnelly was 36 years old at the time, and so was “not a young man”, and he was also on bail.
Browne said that Munnelly had earlier drunk alcohol and taken cocaine and would have been aware of their “disinhibiting effects”.
Mitigating factors taken into account by Browne included Munnelly’s guilty plea, even though it came “very late in the day”.
However, she noted that this was “a complex case” where the pathologist’s report found the cause of death was a cardiac arrest following mild blunt force trauma to the head in the setting of emotional stress in circumstances of alcohol intoxication.
Browne also noted the conclusion of a probation officer who said Munnelly had “a long-standing dependence on alcohol”, was sorry, and that he had made “significant” efforts to rehabilitate in prison.
Browne suspended the final six months of Munnelly’s sentence for one year to allow him to continue this rehabilitation work and directed him to engage post-release with the Probation Service.