The Court of Appeal has dismissed a man’s appeal against 30 convictions for indecent assault and refused the Director of Public Prosecutions’ application to review his sentence as unduly lenient.
In a judgment delivered on 30 January 2017, the court considered the conviction appeal and the sentence review together. The appellant, identified in the judgment as S. T., had been tried on 72 counts involving 13 complainants and convicted by a jury on 30 counts involving six complainants. The allegations concerned pupils at the Christian Brothers National School on Sexton Street, Limerick, during the 1978/79, 1979/80 and 1980/81 school years. Some allegations related to a swimming pool in Southhill, Limerick.
The appeal challenged the decision to try the later indictment before an earlier one, the refusal to separate counts by school year, and the trial judge’s refusal to direct a not-guilty verdict at the close of the prosecution case. The defence argued that the order of trials put it at a strategic disadvantage, including by limiting its ability to challenge how later complaints arose. The Court of Appeal found no unfair prejudice or error of principle in allowing the later indictment to proceed first.
The trial judge had separated the counts relating to the swimming pool but refused to hold separate trials for each school year. The appeal court upheld that decision, citing evidence of similarities between the alleged incidents, their school setting and the teacher’s authority over pupils. It also rejected the challenge to the refusal to withdraw the case from the jury. The court said the suggestion of possible collusion did not provide a sufficient basis to take the case away from the jury.
The original sentence was an aggregate 40 months’ imprisonment, with the final 20 months suspended subject to conditions. The prosecution argued that the sentence gave too much weight to mitigation, including the defendant’s time in custody in an unrelated case, and that too much of the sentence was suspended. The Court of Appeal acknowledged that the sentences were lenient, possibly very lenient, but held they were not significantly outside the sentencing judge’s discretion. It said the judge could take the period of imprisonment into account as an adverse personal circumstance, though the defendant could not expect full credit for it.
The court therefore dismissed all three conviction grounds and refused the prosecution’s sentence-review application. The original convictions and sentence remained in place.