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November 22, 2004
'Dangerous' sex attacker set free by Crown blunder
MARCELLO MEGA -- news.scotsman.com -- UK
A DANGEROUS sex offender with three convictions for serious sexual assaults has walked free from a High Court trial for child abuse as a result of a Crown Office blunder.
Paul Flood, 54, was initially facing more than a dozen charges, including rape, involving four girls aged 13, 11, six and four.
Prosecutors sought to apply the "Moorov doctrine" to the case - the principle that allows a number of similar claims about the same accused to corroborate each other. But the strategy failed when they decided at a late stage not to proceed with the charges relating to the two younger girls.
It emerged earlier this year that prosecutors had been reluctant for many years to proceed with cases where the victims of sexual crime were aged six or under because judges tended not to accept their evidence.
In Flood’s case, the judge, Lady Smith, ruled after three days that the charges relating to the two girls were not sufficiently similar to one another for the Moorov doctrine to be applied.
The 11-year-old girl was seriously sexually abused over a number of years, but without a word of explanation to the child or her family, prosecutors dropped the rape charge against Flood. The offences alleged to have been committed against the oldest girl were not as serious and Lady Smith concluded there was insufficient consistency to allow the case to go to the jury.
What she did not know, although it was well known to prosecutors who prepared the case, was that the youngest girl suffered very serious abuse similar to the 11-year-old, while the six-year-old and the oldest girl suffered similar abuse.
In 1981, Flood was jailed for 18 months at Edinburgh Sheriff Court for indecent assault on a woman. The following year, he attacked a nurse in a park in Edinburgh and indecently assaulted her. He was jailed for four years.
In 1989, he again attacked a woman in a secluded spot, dragging her into undergrowth where he attempted to rape her, and was jailed for five years.
The father of the youngest child in the latest case said: "My daughter and the other very young victim were able to tell the police very clearly what had happened to them.
"All the problems arose when we had to deal with prosecutors. They insisted on interviewing the children alone. They asked for medical examinations. At the end of all that, just before we got to court, they told us our daughter was too young to give evidence."
He and the other parents were also angry at the reason given for the six-year-old not being used in the case
- that she would be unable to sit still in court. Sandra Brown, founder of the Moira Anderson Foundation, a charity that supports the victims of child sexual abuse, said: "Such an attitude simply beggars belief.
"If a child can’t stay still to give evidence, surely the court should accommodate that. It does no one any favours to simply drop charges and enable a dangerous and predatory sex offender to go free."
The families in the case are to present a joint complaint to the Crown Office and the Scottish Parliament, demanding that greater care be taken of children going through the justice system and that greater weight be attached to their evidence.
A Crown Office spokesman said: "The decision to take proceedings is not determined by the age of the children but on a sufficiency of evidence. In this case, the advocate depute met with the families to explain the decisions taken."
Posted by Nealus at November 22, 2004 02:42 PM
Comments
Words defy me.
Posted by: Dan at November 22, 2004 08:39 PM
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