A convicted paedophile was granted a divorce from his estranged wife yesterday just minutes before he was jailed for 4½ years for sexually abusing their daughter.
The abuser, from Co Derry, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was convicted by majority verdicts last month in the crown court in Derry of nine charges of indecently assaulting his daughter over a six-year period between September 1995 and September 2001.
The abuse started when the girl was 11.
Yesterday the defendant, who has been placed on the Sex Offenders Register for life, successfully applied to Judge Melody McReynolds for a divorce from his wife less than an hour before the judge, in a separate hearing, jailed him for the series of sexual assaults on his daughter.
A defence barrister told the court that whatever the sentence would be, the defendant would be punished for the rest of his life.
"He will carry the stigma of this conviction. He has accepted the verdict of the court and he is determined to meet the sanction society imposes upon him in a forthright way," he said.
The judge said she accepted the prosecution's belief that the defendant had "mentally dominated" his daughter and she said that the victim impact report stated that the girl's mother felt that she had failed to protect her daughter.
"Sexual abuse ruins lives and creates a cycle of dysfunction.
"It is therefore the duty of the courts to mark the level of unacceptability of the violation of the rights of our children to develop a trusting relationship with adults and primarily with their parents," she said.
Jailing the defendant for 4½ years, Judge McReynolds also banned him from working with children and said there should be no unsupervised contact between the defendant and children unless approved by the social services.