A couple have had their convictions for the female genital mutilation (FGM) of their one-year-old daughter, which were quashed after they spent two years in prison, declared a miscarriage of justice.<\/p>\n
Their trial was the first of its kind in Ireland and was the subject of an RT\u00c9 documentary late last year.<\/p>\n
At the Court of Appeal on Friday, Judge Patrick McCarthy said newly discovered facts disclosed in expert reports show that there has been a miscarriage of justice.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe find on the balance of probabilities that the applicants are factually innocent,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The husband and wife became the first people to be convicted of the charge in the history of the State, after a Dublin Circuit Criminal Court jury found them guilty in November 2019 of carrying out an act of FGM on their daughter at a Dublin address on September 16th, 2016. Both had pleaded not guilty.<\/p>\n
The parents told doctors that the injuries were caused by a fall on to a plastic toy, an explanation that was rejected by experts who gave evidence at the first trial.<\/p>\n
The now 43-year-old man and 34-year-old woman spent two years in prison before their convictions were overturned by the Court of Appeal in November 2021, after it found the trial had been \u201cunfair\u201d because of \u201cserious and far-reaching inaccuracies\u201d in how the mother and father\u2019s testimony was translated to the jury.<\/p>\n
After the first trial was ruled unfair, the child was returned to the custody of her parents.<\/p>\n
The couple, who are originally from a French-speaking region of Africa, later launched a bid to have their quashed convictions declared a miscarriage of justice.<\/p>\n
At the hearing in January, lawyers for the parents said that an examination of the child by Swedish FGM expert Prof Birgitta Essen in December 2023 proved that she had never been subjected to the procedure.<\/p>\n
Essen had previously viewed a video of a colposcopy carried out on the child in 2019. She said the video showed that FGM had not been carried out.<\/p>\n
The court heard the DPP dropped the charges after the new report commissioned by the State \u201cbroadly\u201d agreed with Essen\u2019s conclusions.<\/p>\n
Delivering judgment on Friday, the judge said the applicants could not have appreciated the significance of the child\u2019s physical condition, which remained unchanged, or properly evaluated the opinions of the prosecution\u2019s medical witnesses, without being aware of the \u201cconflicting evidence of fact and consequent opinion of Prof Essen\u201d, nor that of the new expert retained by the State.<\/p>\n
He said that Essen, after examining video footage of the child, had concluded that \u201cno mutilation had taken place\u201d and that the girl\u2019s clitoris was intact.<\/p>\n
She also found there was \u201cno video evidence of removal of any genital tissue\u201d and that the background information did not indicate an injury due to the practice of FGM.<\/p>\n
Essen conducted a physical medical examination of the child in the company of her mother at a Dublin hospital in December 2023, he noted, and in a subsequent report, she said the clinical examination showed evidence of \u201cintact, uncut external genitalia\u201d. She also found there were \u201cno signs of female genital mutilation\u201d.<\/p>\n
After the physical examination took place, Essen said she could \u201cconfidently assert that there was no doubt\u201d that the child \u201chad not undergone any form of genital mutilation\u201d.<\/p>\n
The judge said the existence of Essen\u2019s conflicting finding of fact came to the notice of the applicants only after their conviction.<\/p>\n
After reviewing additional materials, the State\u2019s expert witness said that her expert opinion was \u201cin line with that of Prof Essen\u201d in judgment of genital anatomy and further that the injuries sustained by the child were \u201cnot compatible with FGM\u201d.<\/p>\n
The court found that the expert opinions were \u201cso enmeshed\u201d with the factual findings based on examination that it fell into the exceptional category, and accordingly, their evidence constitutes a newly discovered fact.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese newly discovered facts show that there has been a miscarriage of justice because, on their evidence, we find on the balance of probabilities that the applicants are factually innocent,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
After judgment was delivered, the father\u2019s senior counsel, Hugh Hartnett, said the issue of costs arise. The matter was put into the last day of term. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A couple have had their convictions for the female genital mutilation (FGM) of their one-year-old daughter, which were…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":173275,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[217105,47354,42,709,43,13393,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-508307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-cork-provision","tag-derelict-ireland","tag-headlines","tag-magazine","tag-news","tag-patrick-freyne","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=508307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508307\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/173275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=508307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=508307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=508307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}