A Limerick journalist, Frank Hamilton, who is serving a three-year prison sentence for sexual assault on a teenage girl, yesterday lost his High Court claim that his detention in the Curragh prison was unlawful.
Hamilton (50), formerly of Shanabooly Avenue, Ballynanty, Limerick, had pleaded guilty in the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court in 1988 to two offences of sexually assaulting the girl in a hotel bedroom in 1994 and 1995. He had received a sentence of 3 1/2 years on each count, the sentences to run consecutively, which meant a total of seven years' imprisonment.
The Court of Criminal Appeal over a year ago reduced the sentences to three years in each case and ordered that they be concurrent. The court found that the charges were charges of sexual assault simpliciter and that there had been no question of any aggravated assault.
Mr Diarmaid Fawsitt, for Hamilton, had told an earlier court hearing that Hamilton had been sentenced in circumstances where the alleged victim was under 16 years of age, notwithstanding that there had been consent.
Hamilton claimed the offence of sexual assault was abolished when the Oireacthas decided to abolish other common-law assault offences and replace them with comparable offences in the 1997 Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act.
But Mr Justice Finnegan in a reserved judgment said he was satisfied that the offence of sexual assault had not been abolished by the introduction of the 1997 act.
The judge said the Criminal Law Rape (Amendment) Act of 1990 provided that the offence of "indecent assault" would in future be known as sexual assault. The offence had its origin as and remained a common-law offence although from time to time the penalty applicable had been laid down by statute.