Young Cork woman 'coerced' into trying to collapse boyfriend's trial gets sentence reduced

The trial that she was trying to interfere with involved a man discharging a gunshot into a house.

The judge said the best he could do in taking the young woman’s personal circumstances into account was to reduce the six months' sentence to four months, commencing now. File image

A young woman operating “under some level of coercion” tried to bring about the collapse of her boyfriend’s trial by getting a man to shout ‘rat’ at her boyfriend in front of a jury.

Barrister Alan O’Dwyer said Megan O’Connor was “under some level of coercion and was under the misapprehension that the trial would collapse and that her partner would return to her.” Facing a six-month sentence the young woman was in Cork Circuit Appeals Court hoping to have that sentence suspended to enable her to continue with efforts to turn her life around since she did this four years ago.