The Supreme Court has allowed an appeal and quashed the conviction of C. Ce., ruling that his trial on historic rape and indecent assault charges was unfair because a key potential witness had died before trial.
The allegations concerned events said to have occurred in Clare between August 1971 and April 1972, when the complainant, identified in the judgment as A.U., and her family stayed with C. Ce. A jury at the Central Criminal Court found him guilty on 12 May 2016. The Supreme Court’s judgment, delivered by Chief Justice Frank Clarke on 19 December 2019, addressed only whether the lapse of time and the death of a potential witness made the trial unfair.
A.U. alleged that C. Ce. indecently assaulted her during a hunting trip and raped her during the same holiday. In her account, his then partner, identified as M.Cy., led her to his bedroom before the alleged rape. M.Cy. and A.U.’s mother, B.C., had died in 2008.
At the close of the prosecution case, the trial judge refused the defence application to halt the trial. She described M.Cy.’s absence as a “lost opportunity” and said the jury would receive a warning about the difficulties caused by delay. The Court of Appeal dismissed C. Ce.’s appeal in 2017, finding that the suggestion M.Cy. would have significantly assisted the defence rested on unjustified assumptions when considered alongside the prosecution evidence.
The Supreme Court said the trial judge had applied the wrong test. The question was whether the missing evidence deprived the accused of a realistic possibility of an obviously useful line of defence, not whether it would have shown that he was unlikely to have committed the offences. The court also found that the Court of Appeal went too far in assessing how credible M.Cy. might have been as a witness, an issue ordinarily for a jury.
The court considered evidence that C. Ce.’s son, C.C., said his father did not deny A.U.’s allegations when confronted and agreed to seek help. The Supreme Court described this as unverified evidence capable of being treated by a jury as an admission, though it had been formally contested and was not independently verified. It also noted uncertainty about what M.Cy. would have said, whether she would have testified, and how her evidence might have stood up to challenge.
Balancing those matters, the court concluded that M.Cy. was a potentially central witness because A.U. placed her at the heart of the account of one alleged incident. Her absence deprived the defence of a realistic possibility of an obviously useful line of defence. The court allowed the appeal and quashed the conviction. It did not make a finding that C. Ce. was innocent.