The Court of Appeal has dismissed S. O’C’s appeal against convictions for 15 counts of indecent assault and three counts of sexual assault, finding that the trial was satisfactory in all the circumstances.
The judgment, delivered by Ms Justice Kennedy on 29 January 2019, dealt only with the conviction appeal. It did not decide the separate appeal against sentence. The convictions followed a Circuit Criminal Court trial on 12 May 2015. The trial judge had imposed one-year prison terms for the indecent assaults and three-year terms for the sexual assaults, to begin after a 10-year sentence imposed in another case. Those sentence details are background to this judgment, not an outcome decided in it.
The appellant had initially faced 51 counts concerning five complainants. Eight counts, relating to allegations at the appellant’s home, were severed before trial. The trial judge withdrew a further 25 counts from the jury. The jury found the appellant guilty on the remaining 18 counts.
The appellant argued that the remaining allegations should have been tried separately because they concerned different complainants, locations and periods. The prosecution submitted that they shared significant features: the complainants attended the same school, the appellant was their teacher, and the alleged conduct involved genital touching. The Court of Appeal held that the trial judge had properly exercised his discretion to allow those counts to be tried together. It said the similarities and the span of years were matters the jury could consider when assessing the allegations.
The court also rejected the challenge to the trial judge’s refusal to discharge the jury after one complainant briefly referred to “several things” happening during sixth class. It found the remark brief, lacking detail and neutral. Differences between two complainants’ accounts of an alleged incident on a trip to Galway were for the jury to assess, the court said, and did not require the trial judge to direct acquittals.
The appellant further argued that missing school roll books and delay made the trial unfair. The appeal court noted that the complainants’ accounts that the appellant had taught them had not been contradicted, and found no real risk of an unfair trial had been demonstrated. It also rejected a complaint that the trial judge had inadequately summarised evidence about alleged incidents in a car in the Dublin mountains when answering a jury question.
The Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal against conviction.