The Supreme Court has dismissed the Director of Public Prosecutions’ appeal against an order prohibiting the trial of a Franciscan priest accused of sexual offences against a girl in the early 1980s.
In a judgment delivered on 28 March 2007, Mr Justice Kearns said the delay in making relevant records available was blameworthy and upheld the High Court’s decision to prohibit the trial. The ruling concerned the prosecution’s handling of disclosure and the resulting delay; it did not determine the truth of the allegations.
The complainant alleged that the abuse began when she was 13 and continued periodically until she left a church choir at 15. The original charges included alleged offences between July 1981 and August 1982. The priest denied the charges, according to the judgment’s account of the proceedings.
The priest was charged in 1997. His first trial date was vacated because of a judge’s prior professional connection with his solicitors. In March 1999, the High Court accepted an undertaking from the DPP’s office to obtain and provide the complainant’s medical records. Further records held by the health board were later ordered to be disclosed.
The priest stood trial in October 2000, but the jury was discharged after statements by the complainant. The judgment said the prosecution had received third-party discovery before that trial. A social-work file containing a 1994 note about an alleged assault by an uncle was disclosed in November 2001. The complainant then gave a statement saying she had used “uncle” to conceal that the alleged perpetrator was a priest. The judgment also described other records and witness information that emerged in 2001 and 2002.
The Supreme Court said the uncle allegation was directly relevant to the complainant’s credibility and that the priest had gone to trial without a potentially significant item of material. It found the DPP had assumed responsibility for assisting with disclosure and had not met that responsibility within a reasonable time. The court also accepted that stress and anxiety could reasonably be inferred from the circumstances, without requiring the priest to provide psychiatric evidence.
The High Court had prohibited the trial in February 2003. The Supreme Court dismissed the DPP’s appeal, leaving that prohibition in place. It based its decision on prosecutorial delay and did not decide the separate, broader question of the prosecution’s general disclosure duties.