The submission of pre-sentencing character references for those convicted of crimes has been the subject of controversy for some time. The practice has deep roots in common law stretching back centuries, and became more regularised following a series of legal decisions in the 1970s and 1980s which confirmed that a sentencing court was required to take account not just of the gravity of an offence but of the personal circumstances of the offender.
That principle is sound. Courts should be in the business of sentencing whole human beings, not abstract categories of wrongdoing. The problem is not with that principle but with how it has come to operate in practice.
The most recent illustration of the gap between principle and practice came when former Fianna Fáil TD Jim Glennon confirmed at the weekend that he was the individual who had submitted a character reference for Daniel Ramamoorthy, who was convicted of the sexual exploitation of a 13-year-old boy. Glennon’s acknowledgment that he had been naive and wrong was belated but welcome. His apology shed light once more on a problem that advocacy groups have been pointing to for years. The issue is not simply that prominent figures lend their names to these letters. It is that the process by which they do so has been opaque and unchallengeable.
Various attempts at reform have been proposed. Victim support organisations and politicians across party lines have raised the matter repeatedly, most urgently in cases involving sexual offences. The Criminal Law (Sexual Offences and Human Trafficking) Act 2024 was intended to address this, requiring that references in such cases be given under oath or affidavit, and making referees potentially available for cross-examination. In practice, however, as the Ramamoorthy case demonstrates, the procedural architecture around these documents remains closed to public scrutiny. A judge may disclose the existence of a reference without identifying the author, and media applications to access the documents have sometimes been refused.
RM Block
Judges themselves have been candid that these references rarely move the dial in serious cases. Where a custodial sentence has effectively been decided, a stack of testimonials from respected figures changes little. If that is so, the argument for keeping them private is hard to understand.
What is needed now is a straightforward requirement that character references submitted to courts in all serious criminal cases be accessible as part of the public record. Transparency of this kind would serve two purposes. It would allow the public to see that the sentencing process is operating fairly and consistently. And it would concentrate the minds of those contemplating whether to put their names to such documents.
