Man seeks to appeal conviction for raping daughter (8)

A man is seeking to appeal a conviction for raping his eight-year-old daughter, an offence for which he was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

The 46-year-old man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had pleaded not guilty to one charge of raping his daughter on a date in September 2007.

Following a retrial he was found guilty by a jury at the Central Criminal Court and sentenced to 12 years imprisonment by Mr Justice Paul Carney on July 11th 2011. He had been cleared of indecent assault to which he had also pleaded not guilty.

The man appealed his conviction for rape in the Court of Appeal on Thursday on grounds that the trial judge erred in refusing to direct the jury to acquit and consequently the jury’s verdict was perverse.

His barrister, Blaise O’Carroll SC, said the victim’s evidence was “so extraordinary, so bizarre, so contradictory, so incredible” that taken as a whole it could not have constituted evidence.

Among the examples cited by Mr O’Carroll was an account that one of the girls said she had been in the house for a year but another girl said she had been in the house for a month.

To even allow some of the victim’s evidence, Mr O’Carroll said, “brings the system into question”. He said the essence of the criminal justice system was to “prevent this happening and it has happened”.

The more one looks at the evidence the more one is filled with “a sense of astonishment,” Mr O’Carroll said, it went into “the realm of fantasy”.

He said the court had a duty to intervene to ensure the constitutional principles of fair trial.

Counsel for the Director of Public Prosecutions, Dominic McGinn SC, said the man was seeking to appeal against the jury's verdict by saying the judge had gotten it wrong.

Mr McGinn said a jury was in the best position to assess credibility and reliability and there was nothing tangible for the defence to point to and say the judge had gotten it wrong.

He said the complainant was thoroughly cross-examined and all the points raised now by the man in his appeal had been put to the complainant in the trial. Furthermore, the judge had summarised all of the evidence for the jury including the inconsistencies.

In those circumstances, Mr McGinn said, the Court of Appeal should be “very, very slow to interfere” in the conviction.

Mr Justice George Birmingham, who sat with Mr Justice Garrett Sheehan and Mr Justice John Edwards, said the court would reserve judgment until a date in March.

In July 2010 the man received a six-year sentence from Ms Justice Elizabeth Dunne after he was found guilty of neglecting four of his five children and assaulting his sons between January 1st and September 28th 2007.

The three boys and two girls were aged between four and 11 before they were taken in to foster care in September 2007.

The jury failed to agree a verdict on a charge of neglect against the man’s youngest son and counts of rape and sexual assault against one of his daughters, while during the trial Ms Justice Dunne directed a verdict of not guilty on a charge of sexual assault against one of his sons. He had denied all of the charges.

During the neglect trial, the court heard evidence from a foster parent that when the two girls entered her care they were “filthy” and wearing soiled underclothing while the youngest girl was “walking alive” with lice.

She said the girls “ate like savages”, while a woman whose children used to play in the same neighbourhood as the two girls said that feeding the victims was “like feeding Oliver Twist”.

He failed to appeal the six-year-sentence in the Court of Criminal Appeal in 2013.

Dismissing the six-year-sentence appeal, Mr Justice Nial Fennelly had said the Court of Criminal Appeal was fortunate that it rarely came in to contact with cases involving such abuse of the fundamental principles of care.

Mr Justice Fennelly had said the fact that the assaults of the boys involved beatings intimately connected to the failure to feed them , with evidence that one boy would be beaten after raiding the fridge for food, was “very shocking” for the court to deal with.

The sentence had elapsed by the time his appeal was heard but he was at that time serving the 12-year-sentence handed down for the conviction he now seeks to appeal.