A 25-YEAR-OLD man accused of having sex with a 13-year-old girl was yesterday found not guilty by a jury at Donegal Circuit Court.
In earlier trials held separately five men have each been convicted of sex offences against the girl on the grounds that she was under age at the time.
The previous trials heard that the girl, who is now 20, had sex 57 times with 22 older men when she was 13.
Yesterday the accused, who was 18 at the time of the incident, was patted on the back by a woman friend when the jury returned a unanimous not guilty verdict.
He said in evidence at Donegal Circuit Court that he believed the girl was 18 or 19 at the time.
The girl with whom he admitted having sex, although he denied knowing her age, walked out of court with her father and a welfare officer while Judge John O’Hagan was thanking the jury.
In the final trial that ended after three days it took a jury of seven women and five men just 29 minutes to find the defendant, who admitted a sex encounter with the girl in his car in October 2003, did not know her age.
The prosecution said it was not suggested the defendant coerced the girl into sex.
The offence was that the girl at the time was too young to be legally capable of consenting to sex.
Judge O’Hagan said that in recent years the Supreme Court ruled that a mistake about the age of a young person could be raised by the defence.
If the jury concluded from the evidence that there was a mistake then the defendant should be given the benefit of the doubt. However, if it rejected it then it must convict.
The judge recalled the defence case that the girl was not refused admission by pub bouncers and she bought drink at the bars. The defendant had told the court: “I believed she was 18 when she was able to get by bouncers on the door and go and buy drink.”
He said the same bouncers had asked him on a separate occasion to produce his driving licence as identity.
Prosecution counsel Eileen O’Leary told the jury the defendant definitely knew the girl’s age as he was going out at the time with a girl of 15 and he would have known she was younger.
Defence counsel Hugo Hynes said the law gave the defendant allowance for a genuine mistake and the defendant believed the girl was older than him.
In the first of five previous hearings, former Army private Kenneth McDonald, from Ballyshannon, Co Donegal, now aged 35, was jailed in June last year for two years and three months after he denied four offences.
Leo Forde (26), of Laghey, Co Donegal, was jailed last July for two years when convicted by a jury of three sex assaults on the girl in a school shelter.
Paul Gilmore (30), from Ballyshannon, who played a tape of himself singing a Westlife song while driving the girl to have sex, is serving nine months after he admitted three offences more than six years later.
He was sentenced to two years but the final 15 months was suspended.
Two other men, Colin Reynolds (27), from Ballyshannon, and Ronan Lowther, from Mountcharles, pleaded guilty to one offence each and were sentenced to 18 months suspended.
The girl, who still cannot be identified, told the final trial that she learned to turn her life around during four years in care and hoped to start third-level education next year.