The Court of Appeal has dismissed an appeal by PB against his convictions for sexual offences involving two sisters, concluding it had not been persuaded that the trial was unfair or the verdicts unsafe.
PB was convicted by majority jury verdicts on 60 of 61 counts, comprising rape and indecent assault offences. He received an aggregate eight-year prison sentence, with the final two years suspended. His appeal was heard remotely. At the start of the hearing, his counsel said two of the five grounds listed in the notice of appeal would not be pursued.
The charges were presented as sample charges covering 1 January 1975 to 31 December 1984. The judgment records convictions on 35 counts of indecent assault involving one complainant and 28 counts of indecent assault and two counts of rape involving the other. The sisters were anonymised in the judgment; it says they were among nine children in the family, which lived outside Limerick.
The appeal judges considered two grounds. The first argued that the trial judge had not properly addressed the risk of contamination between the sisters’ evidence. The court noted there had been no application for separate trials, no request for a corroboration warning and no specific request for a direction on collusion before or after the judge’s charge. It also considered the defence’s exchanges with the trial judge, including counsel’s decision not to seek a warning about possible mutual corroboration.
The court found the jury could understand the defence position: either the alleged conduct occurred or the accounts were fabricated, in which case coordination between the complainants was the only reasonable inference. It held the trial judge’s approach was appropriate in the circumstances and dismissed that ground.
The second ground pursued challenged the verdicts as perverse and inconsistent with proof beyond reasonable doubt. The appellant relied in part on testimony from siblings called for the defence. The appeal court said jurors were best placed to assess the key witnesses and declined to substitute its assessment for theirs. It also observed that no application for a direction had been made at trial and that the criticism of the charge was raised later by a different legal team.
The court said it would have been desirable for the prosecution to explain at the outset why the counts involving two complainants were being tried together and how the jury should consider the evidence. But it concluded that this did not establish unfairness. The appeal was dismissed; the judgment does not alter the trial convictions or sentence.