Man pleads guilty to the defilement of a child

The case of a 22-year-old married man who pleaded guilty to having sex in a fast-food restaurant toilet with an underage schoolgirl three years ago may now become a test case following the intervention of the Rape Crisis Centre.

The man, who cannot be named in order to protect the identity of the victim, pleaded guilty to defilement of a child aged under 17 years of age, when he appeared before Galway Circuit Criminal Court last year.

The plea was accepted by the prosecution at the time.

He was placed under the supervision of the probation service for a year and the matter was adjourned to last week for up-to-date reports on him and on the victim.

Detective Sgt Willie Beirne told the sentence hearing in March 2014 that the girl made a complaint to Gardai that she had been sexually assaulted by the accused in a toilet in McDonald’s in Shop Street on April 8, 2012.

She was 16 years old at the time and was very distressed by what had happened.

She said she met the accused while drinking in Eyre Square with friends and he tried to lure her down an alleyway but she refused to go with him. He then followed her down Shop Street and into the toilet in McDonald’s where, she said, she allowed him kiss her.

She said he then followed her into the cubicle and she shouted for help but he told her to shut up before having sex with her.

The accused was arrested a short time later and denied any involvement.

However, in a second interview he claimed they had had consensual sex. He claimed he thought she was 17 or 18 and when told she was 16, he denied having sex with her at all.

Sgt Beirne said the girl was in secondary school at the time and had very little parental support. He read out a victim impact statement on behalf of the girl who was present in court with a friend.

In her statement, the girl said she had been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder as a result of the sexual assault.  She was very distressed and upset and was still afraid to come into the city for fear of meeting her assailant.

She became severely depressed after the attack and took an overdose.

Her counsellor said at the time that even with counselling, she would continue to suffer well into the future.

Sgt Beirne said the accused had been living in a hostel at the time and was hanging around the streets. He had eight previous convictions for public order offences, burglary, possession of knives and for thefts.

Mr Paul Flannery SC, defending, said last year that his client was now married with one child. He asked for sentence to be deferred.

In light of a positive probation report on the accused last year and on the recommendation of the probation service, Judge Rory McCabe adjourned sentence for a year and placed the accused under the supervision of the service in the interim.

However, a letter handed into court last week from the Rape Crisis Centre and an up-to-date probation report on the accused changed the complexion of the case for Judge McCabe.

While the contents of the letter and the report were not revealed in open court, Judge McCabe said he could not finalise sentence after reading the documents.

Sgt Willie Byrne confirmed to the judge that the girl had attended one appointment at the Rape Crisis Centre but was unable to continue with counselling.

“She is still severely traumatised by what happened to her and she’s still in a very bad place,” he said.

Recalling the evidence at the initial hearing last year, Mr Flannery said it had been the girl’s case in the Book of Evidence that she felt she had been raped.

However, the video evidence from the toilet area (outside the cubicle), he said, showed a different scenario and based on that it was agreed last year between the prosecution and the defence that his client would plead guilty to having sex with an underage girl and that was accepted by the prosecution.

There was no suggestion at the time, he said, that his client had raped the girl and his client had said it was consensual.

Mr Flannery said that in light of the developments (contained in the letter from the Rape Crisis Centre regarding the victim), he found himself at a disadvantage because he was now faced with evidence that put a different ‘colour’ on the case; something that had been taken out of the equation at the start by agreement with the prosecution.

Adjourning sentence to November, Judge McCabe said an unrelated issue had been raised in the accused man’s probation report and that, coupled with the most recent letter from the Rape Crisis Centre, which, he said, was “an opening gambit in what might be a test case down the road” meant he could not finalise the matter just yet.

The judge said that now that the game had commenced, he believed the issues raised in the most recent documents before the court had to “play out” first before justice could take its course in November.