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Allegations
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The jury in a historic
child-sex trial in Christchurch has been told they do not have to decide
whether disgraced Catholic brother Bernard Kevin McGrath sexually molested
vulnerable boys. The only issues to
determine are which ones and how seriously. McGrath, 58, admits he
preyed sexually on boys when he was a teacher and dorm master at Marylands, a
boarding school for troubled youths run by the St John of God Order in
Halswell. But he denies 44
charges of sodomy and indecencies against more than a dozen boys in the
1970s. McGrath did not give
evidence but his lawyer, Raoul Neave, told the jury McGrath had already
confessed to the full extent of his offending when he was jailed in the
mid-1990s for sexually abusing boys at the school and elsewhere. But prosecutor Chris
Lange called more than a dozen former Marylands pupils who claim they were
repeatedly sexually abused by McGrath, as well as by other Catholic brothers,
including some being subjected to sodomy and oral sex. In their final speeches
to the jury before they begin deliberating next week, Neave portrayed the
latest complainants' evidence as unreliable and unsafe, but Lange said their
complaints were too similar to previous offending by McGrath to be mere
coincidence. Neave said there had
been "inconsistencies galore" in the evidence given to the court
and that made their evidence untrustworthy. "I'm not saying
McGrath didn't abuse children. I just say he didn't abuse those ones,"
he said. "The situation we
have here is the evidence cannot amount to proof beyond reasonable doubt.
Clearly in many cases their evidence is weak, exaggerated, and mistaken on
certain key points." The court was told that
substantial payouts had been made by the St John of God Order to those who
claimed to have been sexually abused at Marylands. Neave said the claims
were not assessed for veracity and the prosecution had asked the jury to
adopt a similar approach. "The prosecution's
approach is if they say it, you buy it," he said. "Rather like the
church." Neave accused one
complainant of faking his emotions in the witness box, using "a standard
of acting you see on the afternoon soaps". "Gross
exaggeratoin makes him singularly unsafe as a witness," he said. The witness had been
diagnosed with post-traumatice stress disorder, which affects memory. While in jail in the
mid-1990s for his earlier sex offending, McGrath had admitted to other sex
charges through a process known as custody clearance. "Why would he stop
short there? "He had every
incentive to make a clean breast of things," he said. Another complainant was
adamant that he was sexually abused by McGrath at a time when McGrath was not
at the school. "We've got an
objective fact against which you can test the allegation made by the witness
- and it doesn't match," Neave said. "That happens time
and time again." Lange called on the
jury to use their collective common sense when determining which parts of the
evidence were real. "The defence says
you face an impossible task, trudging through 30-year-old memories," he
said. "The Crown says
that's nonsense." Lange said it was clear
from McGrath's guilty plea to an indecency charge at the start of the trial
that there were sexual offences he had committed against boys at Marylands
which he had not admitted at the time of his last court appearance. The prosecution had
McGrath's previous convictions made known to the jury because it showed a
pattern of conduct in his sexual offending against young boys. Many of the latest
complainants' evidence showed striking similarities to McGrath's offending in
the past, bolstering their claims. Justice Chisholm will
sum up to the jury on Monday. |
