He was jailed for 31 months for providing the police with a false alibi. The Doran family’s lack of respect for the criminal proceedings was evident when their then 21-year-old brother, Jordan, was jailed for contempt of court for using a phone to take pictures of the courtroom during the trial.
Connor and Brandon showed no emotion during the sentencing, in stark contrast with Evans who reportedly broke down upon hearing his sentence, finally coming to terms with the consequences of his actions.
The year before the trial, Ryan Doran was jailed for life for a cold blooded murder of his own. The thug launched an unprovoked attack of 42-year-old groundsman Mr Mitchell who suffered a fractured skull and bleeding on the brain. Passers-by called him an ambulance but he waved them away and tried to walk home.
However, he collapsed in an alley a few hundred yards away and died days later in hospital. Minutes after delivering the fatal blow, the attacker walked into the nearby International Chip Shop demanding tissues for a cut on his hand caused by the breaking bottle, before attacking customers and staff members.
He denied murder but was found guilty after a trial with the jury taking less than an hour to convict him. The court heard he had drunk 10 bottles of Budweiser, smoked cannabis and snorted cocaine when he attacked Mr Mitchell.
He was handed a minimum term of 15 years and concurrent sentences for battery, racially aggravated assault and threats. A member of Mr Mitchell’s family shouted “scum” as he was led to the cells.
Simon Evans, the boy who assisted the younger Doran brothers, was later rewarded with a reduction to his jail term because of his “exceptional” behaviour behind bars.
Speaking in 2018, senior judge Justice Cheema-Grubb said of the teenager: “I am sure that the time has come to mark this young man’s positive approach to his life, his commitment to the service of others and his willingness to take every possible step he can to achieve his long-term life goals without repeating the errors of his youth.” She cut a year off his prison sentence.
However, two years earlier, Brandon Doran wasn’t so lucky. He too applied for a cut to allow for an early chance of parole with his lawyers arguing he had shown himself to be a “decent prisoner”.
But Justice McGowan took a different view, upholding the view that he had not done enough to justify cutting his minimum term.
