A man who first raped his then six-year-old daughter the day after her mother died and continued to rape and sexually assault her over four years has lost his Supreme Court bid to overturn his conviction.
Giving the five-judge court's unanimous judgment, Mr Justice Peter Charleton said that claims by the man and others that his daughter, now in her early 20s and referred to as T, "confessed" after his conviction to having lied at trial were "self-serving" and "cannot be deemed credible".
T had remained adamant, throughout her examination at trial and her father’s appeal to the Court of Appeal that he had raped her and she never accepted she had admitted to having lied at trial, the judge said.
The Court of Appeal, having heard live evidence, had rejected all post-conviction evidence that T had admitted she had lied against her father and it ruled, because that evidence was not worthy of belief, it should not be admitted as evidence.
It fully analysed the background circumstances, including the “particularly important” context and continuity of “blandishments, threats and undermining of confidence” that was concentrated on T once she complained of sexual violence by her father, the judge said. This became a “veritable bombardment of deceit and duress” once he was convicted.
The claims that T had confessed she lied, when viewed in the context of the behaviour of the man and his new partner, now his wife, towards T during her teenage years, was “simply a continuation of their abuse”.
There was “no doubt” that T’s “obvious vulnerability and isolation were sought to be exploited by her father and others “ostensibly acting in what they would, to take a sanguine view, consider his interests”. This pattern of manipulation of, and interference with T, of getting “inside her head”, had begun when she first formally made allegations of what her father had done to her.
After the Court of Appeal rejected the man’s appeal, he secured a further appeal to the Supreme Court which centred on legal issues concerning how an appellate court is to evaluate something alleged to have happened post-conviction which may have been relevant to a person’s guilt.
In the Supreme Court judgment on Thursday, Mr Justice Charleton said, because the fresh evidence which was presented with a view to undermining T’s trial evidence was “not credible”, there was no basis to overrule the jury’s guilty verdict or the Court of Appeal’s analysis of the evidence.
The man was convicted by a jury in February 2018 of multiple counts of rape and sexual assault against his daughter at locations in Ireland, and in another country, on dates between March 2006 and March 2010 when she was between six and 10 years of age. He was later jailed for 15 years for each count of rape and a concurrent six years for sexual assault offences, with the last year conditionally suspended.
The offences began the day after his former partner, the mother of his two children, died and continued until both children were taken into care in 2010 following concerns expressed by a teacher. T disclosed the sexual abuse in 2013.
After his conviction, the man refused food for three days for “religious reasons”. Based on social media posts directed at T, she went to see him in prison believing he was on hunger strike and would die and an emotional encounter took place.
The judge said the background to that visit were communications between T, her father’s wife, and a mother and daughter, the latter around the same age as T, from the wife’s home country, where the man and his two children relocated for a time after T’s mother’s death.
After the prison visit, the father’s wife instructed the father’s solicitor to phone T and suggest she arrange to consult another solicitor with a view to having her retract and declare as lies all of her testimony.
T did not attend an appointment with the other solicitor. She contested her father’s evidence on appeal that she visited him after his trial “full of remorse and guilt”. She also contested testimony by the girl from the wife’s home country that she had said her father was not a rapist.
In the context of that contested retraction of her evidence, there was documentary evidence preserved from social media exchanges of suggestions by the father and his wife that T ought to sue to the State “for having drugged and manipulated her into making false allegations and thereby recover substantial damages”, the judge noted.
