A MAN who had gone on trial accused of abducting his infant daughter from a Health Service Executive facility in March 2010, after voicing concern about her foster home care, was acquitted by a jury yesterday on the second day of the trial in the Circuit Criminal Court in Tralee.
After the unanimous verdict was brought in, the judge criticised the decision to prosecute the young father. He said the criminal proceedings had been “disproportionate” and the prosecution, by the Director of Public Prosecutions, should never have been brought.
Before removing the child, the man and the child’s mother had on several occasions complained to HSE social workers about bruises and other injuries including black eyes on their infant daughter and wanted her to be placed in a different foster home, the court was told.
The health service care workers investigated and had said the injuries were within the normal range and they were satisfied the child was receiving a high standard of care.
After the verdict was brought in by the six man and six woman jury and the man told he was free to go, Judge Carroll Moran told the accused what he had done in taking the law into his own hands was wrong, but to bring criminal proceedings against him was “a bit disproportionate”, as had been argued by the defence team.
“This prosecution should not have been brought,” he said.
The natural parents were not able to care for the child themselves, and the District Court had made an order giving guardianship to the HSE, which had arranged foster care, the trial heard.
They were permitted two visits a week, for 3½ hours and were allowed wheel their daughter around the building and its garden, but were not allowed to remove her from the property. It was during these visits they noticed the marks on their daughter.
Tom Rice, prosecuting, told the jury the accused was the “father, but not the guardian”. This was because he had never applied to be the guardian of the child and he was not married to the child’s mother.
There was no reasonable excuse to plan to take the child out of the jurisdiction when a court order was in place, Mr Rice said.
On the morning of March 3rd, 2010, a social worker brought the girl from her foster home to a HSE facility. The mother of the girl arrived alone for the visit and, after some minutes, was allowed to be alone with the child.
However, when the social worker arrived an hour later, neither was in the room. Closed circuit television footage showed the parents with the child wrapped in her buggy getting off the Tralee train at Heuston Station at 3.10pm later that day.
They were apprehended at Busáras and the accused said he intended to go to Manchester with the child.
“He said this was for the safety of the child . . . I have no reason to dispute that,” Sgt Seamus Magee of Kilmainham Garda station said under cross-examination by Richard Liston, defence counsel.
The garda said he saw photographs on the mother’s phone of a black eye and a cut under the child’s arm.
In his closing address, Mr Liston told the jury the parents did not accept the explanations given to them by the HSE that the injuries were normal for the child’s mobility and age.