A man who raped his children repeatedly for almost two years will spend the next 28 years behind bars, falling two years short of a life sentence.

The 47-year-old rapist appeared in High Court #1 on Tuesday, November 29 before High Court judge Brian Cottle where a jury returned guilty verdicts on five counts of rape that occurred between December 2015 and July 2017.

The first two counts were for two separate occasions of sexual intercourse with one virtual complainant between December 31, 2015 and January 1, 2017.

His third count was on a charge for unlawful sexual intercourse with the same virtual complainant between the months of March and July 2017.

Count number four was that of unlawful sexual intercourse with the same virtual complainant between February 28, 2017 and July 31, 2017. His fifth count was for having unlawful sexual intercourse with the second virtual complainant between October 31, 2016 and December 1, 2016.

The man was sentenced to 22 years on the first and second counts; these sentences will run concurrently. On the other three counts, he was sentenced to two years on each count to run consecutively.

Justice Cottle placed the offence in category one, the highest category when he considered the consequences of the offence. This is because in each case, the virtual complainant was under the age of 10. When the judge looked at the seriousness of the offence, he also found these to be in the highest category.

Cottle said there was a significant age disparity. The children were under 10 and the prisoner was over 40. In addition, there was also the ultimate abuse of trust as the prisoner is the father of the virtual complainants As a result, he began with a 66 per cent starting point of 20 years on the first count of rape.

Cottle looked at the aggravating and mitigating factors of the offence and found that the aggravating factors outweighed the mitigating.

Aggravating were that, the children were of tender years; the offence occurred in the presence of the other child; and there was ejaculation by the prisoner.

“The only thing I can say that might be mitigating of the offence is that there was no violence meted out the virtual complainants apart from the violence necessarily involved in the offence it self,” Cottle said.

The judge also said that although the offender had previous convictions, he did not take them into account because they are not of the same nature. Therefore, there was nothing aggravating about them.

Another mitigating factor for the rapist was that he has no previous relevant convictions. The man is said to have four previous convictions for wounding and assault at the magistrate’s court.

Since the aggravating factors outweighed the mitigating factors, Cottle adjusted the starting point of the sentence by an additional two years bringing the starting point of the sentence to 22 years.

The convicted rapist was therefore sentenced to 22 years on counts one and two, and they will run concurrently.

Cottle added “If I am going to impose three more consecutive sentences of 20 years on each of the remaining counts, that will manifest the excessive…”.

He then sentenced the convicted rapist to two years each on his other three charges; and these sentences will run consecutively after the 22 years have been completed for counts one and two. This brought the total sentence for the prisoner to 28 years of imprisonment.

No time spent on remand was deducted as the time he spent on remand was for an unrelated offence, and there was also no discount for a guilty plea as the convict did not plead guilty to the charges.