The High Court has refused an application to prohibit the prosecution of a man charged over an alleged assault in Athy, finding that culpable prosecutorial delay did not outweigh the public interest in allowing the case to proceed.
The applicant was 16 years and four months old when the alleged offence took place on 28 May 2017. He was charged on 23 February 2021 with one count of assault causing harm under section 3 of the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997. The allegation is that he and two others assaulted a man, causing a black eye, split lip and swollen head. The judgment does not determine whether the assault occurred or whether the applicant is guilty.
The applicant argued that delay caused him to lose protections available under the Children Act 2001, including anonymity and sentencing safeguards, and breached his right to an expeditious trial. The DPP opposed the application. The court noted that one of the other people involved could not be located and the third had entered the juvenile liaison programme. The DPP and the District Court had agreed the case could proceed summarily, limiting the maximum potential prison term to one year.
Justice Miriam O’Regan found the investigation was relatively straightforward. She identified about two and a half months of culpable delay before the applicant turned 18, at a stage when he might otherwise have been dealt with as a child. She also found at least four months of culpable delay after a summons was issued in July 2018 and before his eighteenth birthday. The further period of just over two years before he was charged remained unexplained. The court assessed total prosecutorial delay at two years and six and a half months.
The judge accepted that the applicant had lost the statutory right to anonymity and access to a probation report. She also considered the asserted impact of the later delay on his ability to move on, the lack of evidence that delay impaired a fair trial, the applicant’s age, the seriousness of the allegation, the investigation’s workload and the public interest in prosecution. She found the applicant had not established that pursuing this charge separately from an assault allegation involving another person was oppressive.
The court concluded that the applicant had not shown that the factors, taken together, favoured prohibiting the trial, and refused the relief sought. On costs, the judge gave a provisional view that the DPP should receive its costs, to be adjudicated if the parties could not agree. The parties were allowed 14 days to make written submissions on costs; absent submissions, the proposed order would be made.