A JUDGE will decide next week whether a Catholic priest should stand trial on 20 charges of sexually abusing two boys.
Father Edward Kilpatrick (52), the first Catholic priest in (the North to contest such charges in court, is accused off committing the offences in two parishes in Derry city between 1975 and 1981.
At the city's Crown Court, yesterday Mr Eugene Grant, QC, claimed a serious and grave prejudice existed and the defendant would not receive a fair trial.
Mr Grant said there was a 21 year delay between the date of the alleged offences and the defendant being brought before the court. Several vital defence witnesses were either dead or untraceable and there was a total lack of any contemporaneous forensic evidence.
Mr Grant also said that vital church documents and churchrecords dating back 20 years were not available to the court because they no longer existed.
Counsel for the DPP, Mr Terry McDonald QC, said it was wrong to assume that the defendant's chance of a fair trial had been diluted by the passage of time.
"If the defendant had been tried in 1977 before a jury, the evidence which would have been laid before the court is exactly the same evidence before the court today," he said.