The High Court has refused to extradite an anonymised Roman Catholic priest to Arizona to face allegations of sexually abusing a ten-year-old altar boy in 1978.
The priest, identified in the proceedings as P.O.C., was accused of three incidents involving alleged oral sexual contact, attempted oral sexual contact and anal intercourse. The complainant first reported the allegations to Arizona authorities in December 2002, when he was 34.
The Attorney General sought extradition on foot of an Arizona warrant. P.O.C. brought separate judicial review proceedings seeking to prevent his surrender.
Mr Justice O’Sullivan rejected challenges to the validity and authentication of the warrant and was satisfied that Arizona’s sentencing regime had been established sufficiently for extradition purposes.
The decisive issue was delay. The judge found that if the prosecution were taking place in Ireland he would stop it because the passage of about 26 years created a real risk of an unfair trial. He pointed in particular to an apparent inaccuracy in the complainant’s account of what prompted his 2002 complaint. The judge held that, with so much time having passed, potentially independent material capable of testing recollection and reliability was likely to have disappeared.
O’Sullivan J also concluded that the Arizona bail regime raised constitutional concerns because P.O.C. was likely to remain in custody before trial.
A further hearing followed reports concerning Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s treatment of Maricopa County prisoners. Arizona authorities gave assurances that P.O.C. would instead be housed in a federally approved private facility. The judge declined to rely on that undertaking and found that there remained a risk of detention in conditions incompatible with the applicant’s constitutional rights.
He was also critical of inaccurate and repeatedly corrected information supplied by Arizona authorities, although he stopped short of finding an abuse of the Irish court process.
The court therefore granted relief in the judicial review proceedings and ordered that the extradition request stand refused.