A YOUTH WHOSE sentencing for a fatal stabbing has been delayed while he undergoes brain surgery will be sentenced next month after the judge said the victim’s grieving family needs “finality”.

Justice Eileen Creedon at the Central Criminal Court added that the offender, who was found guilty of manslaughter in 2017 for stabbing 17-year-old Dovydas Jenkas to death, can expect a custodial sentence and “should prepare for that.”

At a brief hearing today counsel for the teenager Michael Bowman SC asked for the sentence hearing to be put back for three months while his client recovers from his latest surgery, which took place two weeks ago.

Patrick McGrath SC for the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) said the victim’s family is “anxious the matter be brought to a conclusion” and Justice Creedon said she shared that anxiety.

She set a date of 20 March for the sentence hearing. The teenager was found guilty in July 2017, she said, and “there’s a grieving family and finality is required.”

The defendant was found not guilty of murder but guilty of the manslaughter of Dovydas Jenkas (17) by a jury at the Central Criminal Court in Castlebar in 2017.

Jenkas of Mount Street, Claremorris died from a single stab wound in the early hours of 19 December, 2015 in Claremorris.

It emerged during the trial that the defendant stabbed Jenkas after learning he was in a bedroom with the offender’s 14-year-old sister.

The court has previously heard that the defendant underwent a left temporal lesionectomy on July 11, 2018. During a previous hearing Dr Tomothy Counihan told Bowman that the defendant had been suffering from “multiple daily seizures of varying degrees of severity”.

Outlining findings contained in a medical report, the doctor said that the defendant suffered from localised-related epilepsy, attributable to a brain lesion in the left temporal lobe, which had not responded to standard medical treatments.