The Court of Appeal has dismissed C.S.’s appeal against convictions for four counts of indecent assault and 15 counts of sexual assault relating to AB, one of two complainant sisters. The court rejected all seven grounds pursued on appeal and left in place the seven-year prison sentence imposed in December 2016.
The offences were alleged to have occurred between April 1988 and December 1994, when AB was aged 10 to 16. The judgment says the assaults took place at the home of AB’s grandmother and at AB’s family home. C.S. was identified in the judgment as AB’s uncle. The indictment originally included 39 counts concerning AB and LB, but the jury returned guilty verdicts only on counts relating to AB and disagreed on all counts concerning LB.
C.S. argued that the trial judge should have excluded the complainants’ evidence before the trial because of possible collusion or influence between them. The Court of Appeal said such concerns generally went to the weight of the evidence for the jury, rather than its admissibility, and found no exceptional circumstances requiring exclusion. It also rejected the argument that the trial should have been stopped because of the way statements were taken, the absence of the complainants’ father PB, or alleged vagueness in the allegations.
PB was sought as a witness because of a statement attributed to him about what LB had said concerning the allegations. Medical reports said he was unfit to attend court because of illness and memory loss following a stroke. The appeal court concluded that his absence did not deprive C.S. of a fair trial, noting that the proposed evidence related to LB’s credibility and the jury disagreed on the counts concerning her.
The court also rejected challenges to the jury directions. The trial judge had told jurors there was no corroboration of the alleged crimes and that each complainant’s counts had to be considered independently. The appeal court found no error in the decision not to give a separate corroboration warning, or in directions addressing the complainants’ credibility and C.S.’s Garda interviews and decision not to testify.
During deliberations, the foreperson became unavailable because her child was sick. The judge discharged her and continued with 11 jurors after electing a new foreperson. The Court of Appeal held that this was within the judge’s discretion under the Juries Act 1976 and that the majority-verdict direction did not make the trial unfair or the verdicts unsafe. The appeal was dismissed.