Actor gets sentence for possessing stun guns reduced on appeal

The Court of Criminal Appeal has today reduced the sentence imposed on an actor convicted of having ten stun guns without a firearms certificate.

Last year Robert Scales (aged 38) of Waterloo Road in Dublin’s Donnybrook was sentenced to two years in prison for the offence, however today the three-judge court held that a sentence of three years suspended was more appropriate.

The sentence was imposed on Scales by Judge Katherine Delahunt at Dublin Circuit Court in December 2008 after Scales had pleaded guilty to the offence.

The actor has appeared in films like 'King Arthur' and 'Braveheart', and has also worked as an actor on RTE's 'Fair City'.

Gardaí found the weapons at his home on November 14, 2007 after customs officers grew suspicious of a package which had arrived from Thailand.

Scales first told gardaí he intended to give the stunguns to female relatives for protection. He later admitted he planned to sell them to taxi drivers.

The actor has been on bail pending his appeal today against the severity of his sentence which was heard before Mr Justice Joseph Finnegan, presiding, sitting with Mr. Justice Daniel Herbert and Mr Justice Eamon de Valera.

Pieter Le Vert BL, counsel for Scales, said the appeal was being brought on a number of grounds including that the sentencing judge’s description of stunguns as “lethal weapons” was a “mischaracterisation”.

Counsel said this offence concerned weapons which “would be at the very lowest end of the fire arms scale”.

Counsel argued that his client had made “a very early plea” and had not obstructed the garda investigation in anyway.

Opposing the appeal, Cormac Quinn BL for the State, said the applicant was “an educated man” who “was not naive or stupid”.

Mr Quinn said Scales “knew what he was doing” when he arranged to import the stunguns for “financial gain”.

In finding that a suspended sentence was a more appropriate punishment, the CCA held that the trial judge erred by handing down a two-year prison term because the object of rehabilitation was not sufficiently taken into account.

The CCA found that while this was “a serious offence”, given that such weapons could fall into the “wrong hands”, Scales was a man “not likely to engage in criminal activity in the future”.

The CCA said the actor was a man of good character with one previous conviction for a “relatively trivial offence”.

A three-year suspended sentence was imposed on the condition the actor enter into a bond to keep the peace.