The High Court has stopped the prosecution of a former primary school teacher on a sexual assault allegation dating from 1982 after finding that the passage of time created a serious risk that he could not receive a fair trial.
The anonymised applicant, P. O'C., faced one count alleging that he assaulted a 12-year-old girl, identified as E, at a primary school between April and June 1982. His trial had been due to take place more than 21 years after the alleged incident.
The complainant first made a formal complaint in June 1998. The court accepted that some delay was explicable: she alleged that the applicant was a teacher at her school, that she feared her parents’ reaction and that she first disclosed the alleged incident to her mother when she was about 15.
However, Ms Justice Finlay Geoghegan found that the evidence did not explain the entire period before the formal complaint. The complainant had reached adulthood in 1987 and had later been in a supportive relationship. The judge concluded that approximately seven to ten years of the reporting delay was not shown, on the balance of probabilities, to have been caused by the alleged abuse or the relationship with the applicant.
The court then considered whether the delay prejudiced the defence. The applicant had been an international athlete at the time and said he could establish that he competed in Paris and Brussels on Saturdays close to the alleged incident. But he could no longer precisely recall his movements on the relevant Saturday, while a fellow athlete could not remember the events and old training diaries had been destroyed.
The judge held that, had the complaint been made years earlier, the applicant would have been in a better position to reconstruct his movements and obtain corroborating evidence.
The High Court found at least presumptive prejudice sufficient to create a serious risk of an unfair trial and restrained the DPP from proceeding with the indictment. The ruling did not determine whether the alleged assault occurred.