A MAN who pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting 15 children when they were aged between two- and eight-years-old has been jailed for 13 years. The judge imposed a 20-year term with the final seven years suspended.
Kevin Scully (26), Glounaphuca, Caheragh, Drimoleague, Co Cork, also had his name placed on the register of sex offenders until he reaches the age of 55. He was ordered not to return to west Cork for 10 years upon his release from jail.
Judge Patrick Moran at Cork Circuit Criminal Court yesterday backdated the sentence to May 2003 when Scully was first admitted to the Central Mental Hospital after he was found by a jury to be unfit to plead to the charges. He was later deemed fit to plead.
He had been remanded in custody for sentence until yesterday after he had pleaded guilty to 16 sample counts of sexual assault on the 15 children in west Cork between June 1999 and April 2000.
Marjorie Farrelly SC, said her client had pleaded guilty and provided “a very high level of co-operation” to gardaí by volunteering information to them about sexual assaults that might not otherwise have come to light.
In January, Det Garda Bart O’Leary told the court that the offences came to light when a three-year-old girl complained to her mother that Scully had abused her. Following a medical examination of the child, child protection services contacted gardaí.
Gardaí arrested Scully on April 24th, 2000. He admitted sexually assaulting the little girl and eight other girls aged between two and eight years. During a second arrest on May 23rd, 2000, he admitted sexually assaulting six more girls and seven boys.
Gardaí set about identifying the victims as Scully did not know all their names and, over the course of a number of months, officers took statements from the children’s parents. Fifteen parents opted to press charges, said Det Garda O’Leary.
Ms Farrelly submitted yesterday that the State would have had great difficulty in prosecuting Scully for these offences had he not co-operated, adding that the courts had recognised the mitigating value of a guilty plea in sexual assault cases, particularly those involving children.
Ms Farrelly also submitted in mitigation that Scully was very young at the time of the offences, a teenager, and to this day, he still did not know why he had embarked upon the offending behaviour.
The court had earlier heard that Scully had been sent by the then southern health board to Glebe House in Cambridgeshire in England for treatment in 2002 for a two-year course at a cost of IR£280,000, but experts there felt that he still posed a high risk of re-offending.
Judge Moran noted that probation officers who had dealt with Scully felt he had “continually used strategies of avoidance and minimisation to avoid addressing his offending behaviour”, while there was also contradictory evidence as to how remorseful he was.
Judge Moran noted that Dr Harry Kennedy, director of the Central Mental Hospital, where Scully spent five years after a jury decided he was unfit to plead, believed that therapies designed to “enhance victim empathy bore no fruit”.
Judge Moran accepted that Scully’s guilty plea was a mitigating factor in his favour but he said that he was concerned about the high risk of him reoffending, identified by both probation and psychiatric experts, and he wanted to include an element of supervision upon release.
He noted that the children were of a very tender age and highly vulnerable and he believed that the offences were, because of the age of the victims, at the higher end of the scale of sexual abuse.
He jailed Scully for 20 years with seven years suspended, backdated to 2003.
