The Court of Appeal has dismissed Noel Kelleher’s appeal against convictions for rape, oral rape, attempted oral rape and sexual assault, finding that the trial judge’s decisions on indictment dates and jury deliberations did not make the trial unfair or the verdicts unsafe.
Kelleher had been convicted in the Central Criminal Court in December 2017 on six rape counts, three oral rape counts, one attempted oral rape count and three sexual assault counts. He was sentenced to nine years in prison, with the final year suspended. The appeal was against conviction.
The complainant, whose initials in the judgment are expressly described as not her actual initials, told the jury that abuse began when she was about 12 and continued over a period in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her account included alleged incidents at the appellant’s family home, at O’Keeffe’s Oil Depot on Drumcliffe Road in Ennis, and at two offices of his auctioneering firm. Those were allegations presented at trial, not findings made by the appeal court.
One appeal ground concerned the trial judge’s decision to restore the end date on counts 17 to 19 and 23 to 32 to 31 August 1992. After the prosecution evidence had closed and the defence had delivered its closing address, the judge allowed a further amendment to dates that had earlier been changed to end on 7 December 1991. The defence objected, arguing the application came too late. The Court of Appeal said it would have been preferable for the date issue to have been dealt with before closing speeches, but agreed that no injustice had been shown. It noted that the defence’s main concern related to a different count, and that its objection on that count had succeeded.
Kelleher also challenged the timing of the trial judge’s majority-verdict direction. The jury had deliberated for more than six hours and had returned not-guilty verdicts on counts 1 to 16 before receiving the direction. It later returned majority verdicts of 10 to 2 on the remaining counts. The appeal court was not persuaded that giving the direction at that stage was an error or made the trial unsatisfactory.
The court also rejected the contention that the combined effect of the appeal grounds made the convictions unsafe. It dismissed the appeal against conviction. The judgment does not set out a separate decision on the sentence appeal.