Irish Soldier Receives No Jail Time for Assaulting Woman

metroweekly.com:

The Guardian.He later boasted of the incident to friends on Snapchat: “Two to put her down, two to put her out.”O’Brien suffered a broken nose, swelling, bruising, and a concussion.

She later told the Limerick circuit criminal court that the attack left her feeling like “a punching bag” and that her last conscious thought was, “He’s not stopping.

I’m going to die.”O’Brien said she suffered from persistent concussion symptoms and a sense of dread and isolation, which led to self-destructive behavior and the loss of her job at a local pub.“I became numb and detached from reality, living in perpetual fear of seeing him again,” she testified.Crotty initially claimed that O’Brien had instigated the violence, but later decided to plead guilty after closed-circuit television camera footage showed that the assault was unprovoked.O’Brien had been on her way home after work when she asked Crotty to stop hurling anti-gay slurs.

She did not know him previously.Crotty’s superior, commandant Paul Togher, testified that the 22-year-old had acted out of character and was an exemplary and disciplined soldier.On June 20, Judge Tom O’Donnell gave Crotty a fully-suspended three-year sentence and ordered him to pay 3,000 euros in compensation.O’Donnell called the assault appalling, cowardly, and vicious, but took into account Crotty’s guilty plea, his lack of previous convictions, and the potential end to his army career if sentenced to jail.O’Brien criticized the sentence as emblematic of a broken system, noting that other assault cases had also resulted in outcomes where perpetrators did not serve time in jail, which she argued has the effect of deterring victims from pursuing charges against their attackers.“This is not just this man,.