Appeal court rules against public naming of deceased child.

A victim of child rape has succeeded in having her rapist named, 18 months after his conviction.

The woman, who is now an adult, had also wished to waive her right to anonymity and speak in person about her case.

However, because of a recent ruling concerning the law on identification of child victims of crime, the media is prevented from publishing her name.

Declan Hannon, 50, first raped the nine-year-old child during a game of hide-and-seek when he was aged 17. He raped her three more times during the summer in around 1987 or 1989.

stockshares wrote: »

I hope so but I would be skeptical of anything she says.

The amount of decisions that are made in the courts that don't benefit children at all would make you wonder about the Judges that made them.

Peregrinus wrote: »

Never mind the constitution, there's a plain common-sense requirement that legislators should consider legislation carefully before they enact it.

We're in the position we're in because the existing legislation wasn't fully thought through when it was enacted. And you want to solve that by passing new legislation with even less consideration than the existing legislation got. What could possibly go wrong?

AndrewJRenko wrote: »

Brenda Power the expert in drafting legislation? Or Brenda Power the Junior Counsel who doesn't claim any expertise in drafting legislation?

https://www.lawlibrary.ie/members/Brenda-Power/1113.aspx

Victor wrote: »

The thing is, many barristers focus on particular areas of work. Some only do tax law, company law, planning law, etc. That rules all of them out. There there is criminal law - a chunk of them focus on finding the loopholes to protect their clients. You are left with a list of those who prosecute very serious crimes and those that deal with child protection issue. That overlap might be quite small. Whoever you pick then has to review the entire law to make sure there is no conflict between existing law (criminal, civil rights, child protection, etc.) and the proposed law. It is not straightforward.

I did law as a subject in college, not a course. I review council bye-laws. Often if can take me only minutes to find an error. Some of the errors I find are profound. Would you condemn the memory of children to precipitous action?

Peregrinus wrote: »

Other children might matter. How does Brenda Power's one sentence affect the cases of other children in different circumstances?

Peregrinus wrote: »

But we need to think about what change should be made. It would be simple to say that the law doesn't apply to a child who has died, but that might be too crude. Suppose a child who is the victim of a crime has died, but the death is unrelated to the crime. Now the media can identify the child and write what they like; this might cause considerable distress to the child's family. Or, suppose that a child is a victim of murder or manslaughter in circumstances where they child was engaged in sex work, or committing a burglary, or joyriding, or whatever. Again, you can see considerable distress to the family resulting if there is no protection at all.

So maybe the change should be one in which court permission is still required, but where the child is deceased the court must consider the interests, not of the child, but of the child's family. But, of course, where the offender is a member of the child's family - which, in child death cases, will often be so - then it's not in the interests of the child's family to identify the child, since that will also identify the offender.

In short, there's a wide variety of possible situations here, and a short one-size-fits-all rule about naming deceased children is not likely to be satisfactory. It's easy to say that the present law is satisfactory; it's a bigger job to work out what a satisfactory law would say. What set of principles should be applied to protect the dignity of a deceased child, and the feelings of the surviving family?