The Court of Appeal has dismissed Noel Kelleher’s appeal against convictions for rape, oral rape, attempted oral rape and sexual assault, finding that the trial judge’s decisions on indictment dates and a jury majority-verdict direction did not make the trial unfair or the verdicts unsafe.
Kelleher was convicted in the Central Criminal Court on 6 December 2017 on 13 counts. He received a nine-year prison sentence, with the final year suspended. The appeal concerned those convictions.
The complainant, identified in the judgment as “Ms. MR (not actual initials)”, told the jury that abuse began when she was about 12 and continued over several years in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her allegations included incidents at Kelleher’s family home, at O’Keeffe’s Oil Depot on Drumcliffe Road in Ennis, and at two offices of his auctioneering firm. Kelleher denied sexual impropriety in Garda interviews. He said he did not recall the complainant working in his office, while not ruling out that some work experience might have taken place.
After the evidence had closed and the prosecution had made its closing address, the trial judge raised concerns about the evidence on some counts. Counts 20 to 22 were then dismissed by directed verdicts of not guilty. The prosecution sought changes to the date ranges on other counts. The judge first narrowed those ranges, then, before delivering her charge to the jury and after the defence closing address, allowed the end dates to return to 31 August 1992. The defence objected to the later application and declined an offer to address the jury again.
The Court of Appeal said it would have been preferable for the dates to have been dealt with before closing speeches. But it agreed that restoring the original end date caused no injustice, and found no error that made the trial unfair or the verdicts unsafe or unsatisfactory.
The appeal also challenged the timing of the judge’s majority-verdict direction. The jury had deliberated for more than six hours when it reported not-guilty verdicts on Counts 2 to 16 and said it had not yet adjudicated on several remaining counts. After the judge explained that a majority verdict was possible, the jury returned 10–2 guilty verdicts on the remaining counts. The appeal court said the jury had deliberated for a considerable period and was not persuaded that the direction was an error or rendered the trial unsatisfactory.
It rejected the cumulative challenge as well and dismissed the appeal against conviction. The ruling left the convictions and sentence in place.