The Court of Appeal has dismissed an appeal by W.T. against his conviction on 56 counts of sexual assault, rejecting his argument that delay had prejudiced his defence and that the trial should have been stopped.
W.T. was convicted on 13 June 2012 of offences stated to have occurred between 1993 and 2000. He received consecutive four-year prison terms for offences connected with two flats, giving an effective sentence of eight years. The appeal was limited to whether the trial judge should have halted the trial because of delay and alleged prejudice; the Court of Appeal did not overturn the conviction.
The complainant, identified in the judgment as L, said the abuse began when she was six or seven and continued until she was eleven or twelve. She described incidents at the Ballymun flat where she lived with her mother and older brother, and at a separate flat occupied by W.T. The court’s account of the complainant’s evidence included an incident in which W.T.’s sister, Ms. A, may have seen abuse. W.T. denied the allegations when interviewed and when giving evidence at trial.
The appeal relied on three alleged sources of prejudice: the inability to establish the date of a chip-pan fire described by the complainant, and the deaths of W.T.’s father and sister. The court rejected the fire-record argument as speculative, noting that there was no dispute that a fire occurred and that the suggested effect of a different date on the complainant’s credibility was not grounded in the case facts.
The court considered the father’s potential evidence of limited relevance because no one suggested he had witnessed anything relevant to the disputed matters. It treated Ms. A’s absence as the central issue. The complainant had said Ms. A opened a door during an incident and left; her accounts differed as to who closed it. The court accepted that Ms. A was potentially significant, but said any claim that her evidence would have undermined the prosecution case was speculative. Her evidence might have supported the complainant, been neutral, or contradicted her account, and the court could not determine which.
The court therefore found no error in the trial judge’s decision to let the case proceed and dismissed the appeal against conviction. It also said it had not been established that delay by the complainant in reporting the allegations, and the resulting delay before trial, had deprived W.T. of Ms. A’s evidence.