A Donegal school teacher accused of engaging in a sexual act with a teenage girl has been acquitted following a trial.
A jury of eight men and four women at Letterkenny Circuit Court took just under an hour to reach a unanimous decision of not guilty.
The trial of the man, who is in his 40s and cannot be named for legal reasons, lasted for six days before Judge John Aylmer.
The man had pleaded not guilty to the defilement of a child under 17 years of age, an offence contrary to section 3 (1) (b) of the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act, 2006, as substituted by section 17 of the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 2017, as applied by section 42 of the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 2017.
He was charged that, being a person in authority, he did engage in a sexual act, namely sexual intercourse, with a child under 17 years of age.
The man was accompanied by his partner in court throughout the trial. Legal representatives attended on a watching brief basis on behalf of the Teaching Council and the State Claims Agency.
The girl was 16 at the time of the alleged incident, which the complaint said occured while on a school trip, while the teacher was in his 40s.
A recording of the complainant’s interview with a detective garda played to the court
“My teacher raped me,” the complainant told the detective.
On the second night of the trip, some of the group stayed in the lobby of their hotel, while other students and the teacher retired to the educator’s bedroom.
The complainant said she noticed the teacher was “kind of tipsy” and claimed that he told her “you are so flirtaous”, something she said “made me uncomfortable and wasn’t something a teacher should be saying”.
During the time in the bedroom of the teacher, it was alleged that he kissed her and touched her thigh.
The complainant said that she received a WhatsApp message, after she went back to her own allocated room, telling her that she forgot her phone in the teacher’s room and to come back.
It was during this trip to the teacher’s bedroom where she alleged that the teacher engaged in sexual intercourse with her. At the time she left her own room, she told the others in the room that she had gone to the lobby.
In her interview with gardai, the complainant said: “He made me feel so weak. I didn’t know what to do. I was more terrified for my life than anything. A teacher, you can trust them like, you just trust them, but I saw a different side and it scared me. It just made me feel so worthless. It felt horrible.”
A formal complaint was made to An Garda Siochana around three months after the incident was alleged to have occurred, following a conversation with family members.
At all times, the man steadfastly denied the allegations.
“I’m innocent,” he told detectives following his arrest. “This is all horrifying. That didn’t happen.”
The man told gardai that he was “very distraught” at the allegation, which he said was “nonsense”.
The court heard a claim that the man told her that he could go to jail and lose his job if the story got out.
It was claimed that there were “10 to 20” conversations between the two in the intervening three months after the trip. Mr Orange said this amounted to her “putting yourself in his line of vision”.
“I would say that I had no-one else to talk to,” the woman said. “My emotions were all over the place.”
Mr Orange asked the woman if she “developed a crush” on the teacher. “I did not have a crush on him,” she said.
The complainant deleted the text message she claimed to have received from the teacher as she “made up my mind that I never want to think about this again”.
An expert witness said that an analysis of phone records showed a WhatsApp message was sent from one of the parties to the other in the early hours of the morning, but it could not be determined who sent the message.
CCTV was not available as the hotel’s footage was overwritten after one week.
The trial also heard evidence from some other students, another teacher in the school, the former manager of the hotel and a garda specialising in mobile phone analysis as well as the complainant’s mother and a nurse from the Donegal Sexual Assault Treatment Unit (SATU).
Mr Garnet Orange SC, with Mr Gareth McGrory BL, instructed by solicitor Mr Rory O’Brien, for the accused, told Judge Aylmer that his client was “deprived of a means of nailing down his defence” due to the absence of the CCTV and the WhatsApp message.
“It is classic unfairness,” Mr Orange said. “There is not a shred of evidence that comes from anyone other than the complainant.”
State prosecutor Ms Fiona Crawford BL told the jury that the man organised the trip and that, having obtained the complainant’s passport, he would have known her age.
Ms Crawford reminded the jury that the accused man admitted to gardai in his interview that it was “not my finest hour” in having students in his room and “failing to get rid of them earlier”.
Mr Orange asked the jury to see the case as if it were a jigsaw puzzle.
“When you are looking at the final picture, it doesn’t match the picture that’s on the box and that is a big problem with the prosecution’s case here,” Mr Orange said.
“He let his guard down and he let himself down. Undoubtedly, there shouldn’t have been that level of interaction with students late at night. Clearly he did not behave appropriately. For a brief period of time, the barriers came down and he let his guard down…he is not on trial for that.
“No matter how we look at it, there is no evidence to contradict what he said”.
After just under an hour of deliberating, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.