The Court of Appeal has quashed three convictions against an anonymised appellant in a historic child sexual abuse case, ruling that the counts were improperly framed as alternatives for the same alleged offences.
The court dismissed the appeal against four other convictions. The appellant had been convicted at Cork Circuit Criminal Court in February 2020 of seven counts of indecent assault involving two brothers, identified as M.B. and S.B. The alleged offences were said to have occurred between 1985 and 1989, when the complainants were children.
In a judgment delivered on 21 December 2021, the Court of Appeal said the trial indictment had been amended three times and ended with 15 counts. Four alleged incidents were charged through alternative counts that set out different possible dates for the same offence. The jury convicted on three of the counts in that group, alongside four freestanding counts.
The appeal court held there was no proper basis for charging the same offence more than once on the same indictment to address uncertainty about when it happened. It quashed the convictions on counts 3, 6 and 15 of the final indictment. Those counts concerned allegations involving a film at M.B.’s home and Subbuteo games at the brothers’ grandparents’ home. The court did not quash the related acquittals.
The four surviving convictions were counts 1, 4, 8 and 12: two concerning incidents at a public house, one at M.B.’s home and one at S.B.’s home. The court said the alternative-count error did not undermine these freestanding counts and found sufficient evidence to support them.
The appellant also challenged the repeated indictment amendments, the handling of delay and alleged prejudice, the refusal to direct acquittals on other grounds, and the trial judge’s comments to the jury about emotion. The Court of Appeal rejected those grounds, finding the permitted amendments did not undermine the overall fairness of the trial and that the jury had been directed to decide the case objectively on the evidence.
The court therefore allowed the appeal only in part. It quashed the three specified convictions and dismissed the appeal against the other four convictions.