An Orangeman has been convicted of driving over a teenage girl after "ploughing" into a crowd of nationalists at a contentious north Belfast interface two years ago.
At Belfast Crown Court on Thursday, a jury of eight women and four men took three hours to reach a majority 11-1 verdict, convicting 63-year-old John Alexander Aughey of the charges arising from the incident close to the Ardoyne shops on July 13th, 2015.
Among the six charges Aughey, from Brae Hill Park, was convicted of was causing grievous bodily harm to a then 16-year-old girl, Phoebe Clawson, by dangerously driving his car on Belfast's Crumlin Road.
She was trapped under the wheels of his red Nissan Pulsar, fracturing her pelvis, ankle and collarbone.
‘Shattered pelvis’
Jurors, some of whom gasped on being shown a video of the moment she was flung on to the bonnet, and under the car, heard she spent two weeks in hospital after undergoing a five-hour emergency operation on her “shattered pelvis”.
Before striking her, Aughey had also stuck and injured a community representative and two other civilians before injuring two police officers.
During his nine-day trial over three weeks, Aughey claimed he had been driving home after marching earlier that day and had made a “U-turn” manoeuvre taking him into the crowd “in a blind panic”, after believing his car had come under attack.
He maintained he had not driven deliberately at the crowd, making the case that as he sat in traffic he became aware of abuse and shouting coming from the protesters.
He said that after missiles had hit his car and his wing mirror was kicked, in a “blind panic” he tried to perform a U-turn to get back down the road “to the safety” of police lines.
‘Tantamount to suicide’
When asked why he did not just get out of the car and walk a matter of yards to a police 4x4, Aughey said: “If I had got out of the car it would have been tantamount of committing suicide.”
However, prosecution barrister Neil Connor QC accused him of not only lying to police two years ago, but also of lying to the court.
Mr Connor said the issue was a simple one, in which Augher had driven his car in a manner which was dangerous and which fell far short of what would have been expected from a competent and careful driver.
Following their verdicts, trial Judge Patricia Smyth praised jury members for dealing with what she described as "probably being one of the most difficult trials that any jury in Northern Ireland has been asked to decide upon".
Freeing Aughey on continuing bail until after the summer recess in August, Judge Smyth told him that should not be taken “as an indication of the sentence the court will pass in due course”.