The Court of Appeal has dismissed P.M.’s appeal against three convictions involving his young daughter, finding no basis to overturn the trial judge’s decisions on the evidence or the jury’s verdicts.
The appeal concerned convictions recorded by a jury in the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court on 20 May 2014. P.M. was convicted of encouraging or knowingly facilitating the production of child pornography, sexual exploitation of a child, and child cruelty. He was acquitted on a separate charge of producing child pornography. The Court of Appeal judgment, delivered on 21 December 2015, dealt only with the convictions appeal. Although P.M. had also appealed the severity of his sentences, the court did not decide that appeal in this judgment.
The case followed the discovery of an SD card containing images involving an adult and a very young child. The judgment says the child was identified as “A”, P.M.’s then four-year-old daughter. The prosecution relied on a video recovered from the card, along with statements P.M. made to gardaí on 11 and 23 June 2010.
P.M. argued that the statements should have been excluded because he may not have understood his right to silence and because the circumstances in which the first statement was taken were unfair. Psychologists gave differing assessments of his cognitive abilities and vulnerability. The Court of Appeal found no error in the trial judge’s decision to admit the statements. It noted that P.M. had been cautioned, had confirmed that he understood, and had signed acknowledgments. The court also said a caution must effectively communicate its meaning, while finding that the trial judge was entitled to conclude that this had happened in this case.
The court criticised as poor practice the apparent use of questions and answers to create a record presented as an uninterrupted narrative. It said that approach can be unfair because it omits the questions and their framing. But it concluded that the trial judge had been entitled to admit the statement in the circumstances, including that it was read back to P.M. and he had the opportunity to correct it.
P.M. also argued that the trial judge should have withdrawn the charges from the jury because the evidence was insufficient, and that the guilty verdicts were perverse. The Court of Appeal held that there was sufficient evidence for a properly directed jury to consider each charge. It said the jury was entitled to assess the video and the surrounding evidence as a whole, including material that could be favourable to P.M. The convictions appeal was dismissed.