A former garda has been jailed for six years for falsely imprisoning and sexually assaulting a woman in a Co Wicklow Garda station.
William Ryan (41) was convicted by a Dublin Circuit Criminal Court jury last year of three counts of sexual assault and one count of false imprisonment of the woman at Aughrim Garda station, Main Street, Aughrim on September 29th, 2020.
He has been in custody since being found guilty and has resigned from An Garda Síochána.
The victim in the case, who cannot be named to protect her anonymity, told the court she felt “broken” and “degraded” during the trial process.
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Ryan took the stand and gave a false version of the events of that day, which were later described by the prosecution as “badly-written erotica”.
Defence counsel told the court on Monday that Ryan now “unreservedly accepts his guilt in relation to all of the charges”.
Breffni Gordon, defending, handed in 35 testimonials on behalf of Ryan, including from gardaí who he said were precluded from coming to court to give evidence and one from a former superintendent. Ryan had no previous convictions.
Sentencing Ryan, Judge Elma Sheahan said the public “must be able to have trust and confidence in their gardaí”.
She said Ryan’s offending was “a breach of trust involving a member of An Garda Síochána and the community he was there to serve and certainly not abuse”.
The maximum sentence for sexual assault is 10 years and the maximum for false imprisonment is life. Judge Sheahan set a headline sentence of eight years, which she reduced to six years taking mitigation into account.
The court heard Ryan prevented the complainant from leaving the station and sexually assaulted her three times after she came to seek advice about retrieving her son’s car, which had been seized by gardaí the previous day.
Before attending the station, the woman had a phone discussion with Ryan, who insisted she come in to sort out the matter. The court heard he told her to “wear something tight” before hanging up.
At the station, Ryan sexually assaulted the woman twice by slapping her bottom and groping her breast. He then “ushered” her upstairs, where he masturbated as she stood facing away from him and he sexually assaulted her again by digitally penetrating her vagina.
The court heard that before being taken upstairs, the woman showed Ryan a photograph of herself in her swimwear in an attempt to appease him.
Ryan gave evidence during the trial, claiming the encounter was consensual, which the prosecution said was “implausible” and like “badly-written erotica”.
In her victim impact statement, the woman said she had “never felt so uncomfortable, so afraid” as she did during the trial process.
She said Ryan’s version of events was harmful and had damaged her efforts in the previous four years to build her life back.
“He has broken me twice,” she said of Ryan. “The first was when he sexually assaulted and imprisoned me. The other was when I came to court and had to go through a trial, with [my] pictures and his version of events.”
The woman said she found it difficult to explain what happened that day, saying she had always thought she was the kind of person who would “fight off” such an attack.
“I was frozen,” she said. “It was like my feet were stuck to the ground.”
The woman said she had spent the years since the attack “hiding away” in her house, afraid to go out and meet people in her community or be among crowds.
“I felt such shame, even though I knew I had done nothing wrong,” she said.
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