‘An impressive witness’: Young Kerry girl secures conviction in indecent exposure case
The KerrymanThe steady testimony of a six-year-old girl has secured a conviction for an elderly man charged with indecent exposure.
“To say that she was an impressive witness for her age is clearly an understatement,” said Judge David Waters at a District Court sitting in Kerry.
The girl, the accused and details of the case cannot be shared for legal reasons.
The court was shown a DVD of a 19-minute garda interview with the girl recorded days after the event.
In the recording, she explained the father-in-law of her childminder had unzipped his pants and ‘showed his front bum’. She described the body part as what boys used for peeing and indicated he had tickled her leg on the outside of her pink tights.
After the video, the girl gave live testimony from a room within the courthouse, shown in the main courtroom by video link. As the video was set up, she sat in the background eating a snack while her mother played with her hair. When she sat before the camera, she was so small that her head barely showed on the video until the camera was adjusted.
She gave detailed testimony, noting the incident happened when they were seated at the kitchen table and she was eating her dinner. The girl said other children were in the adjacent playroom at the time.
The accused sat in the gallery throughout the proceedings.
Her mother, father and aunt all testified for the State, as did the childminder and a detective. The mother told the court her daughter seemed uncharacteristically quiet when she collected her from childcare on the day of the incident. After a few minutes in the car, the daughter said the accused had shown her his ‘front bum’, the terminology used by the family for genitalia.
The girl also told her mother that the accused touched her on the outside of her tights, pointing to her thigh. The court heard that the daughter repeated similar statements to her father and later to her cousins, as overheard by her aunt.
“She was saying, ‘I didn’t like it, I don’t know why he did it’,” the mother told the court.
The childminder testified she had asked her father-in-law to mind children in her care while she did a school pickup. She was gone for about 25 minutes. She noted that she occasionally left children in the care of her mother or her father-in-law but always told parents and had their approval.
She said her father-in-law was seated at the kitchen table when she returned. Then, she said, she prepared dinner for the children.
The detective noted the childminder had been extremely cooperative during the investigation and the judge praised her honest demeanour.
Excerpts from an interview with the accused and gardaí were also read, in which the accused said he ‘seldom’ went to the childminder’s house but when he did, it was between 2.20pm and 2.50pm during the school pickup.
He noted the child was inconsistent about who was in the house at the time and said he did not have dinner with her.
“I didn’t touch her,” he said in the interview.
Barrister for the State, Sarah-Jane Comerford, said the court could be satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt, noting the girl’s consistency in her descriptions of where they were seated and details of the unzipping.
She noted the accused had opportunity to be alone with the child during a 20 to 25 minute period and that the child consistently voiced her dislike of what happened.
It was a critical point in the case, as the charge against the accused specified that the genitals are exposed ‘intending to cause fear, distress or alarm to another person’.
Barrister for the accused, Katie O’Connell, noted allegations were uncorroborated by physical evidence and highlighted contradictions in evidence presented by the child and State witnesses, including the dinner time and who was present in the house.
Judge David Waters observed inconsistencies are inevitable in any case with a young child’s testimony but praised her clarity and consistency of key details as “compelling”.
“I am satisfied. On these circumstances, I have to convict,” he said.
The case was adjourned to March 20 in Tralee for sentencing.
The judge also commented on the “lackadaisical attitude to childcare”, stating it bore no bearing on his sentencing but was “astonishing”.
“These things don’t happen if a child is in properly vetted childcare,” he said.