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Co Armagh man has sentence for sexually abusing schoolboy overturned

Gerard Judge was sentence to five years in prison back in 2015

A county Armagh man has won his appeal against his conviction for sexually abusing a schoolboy 35 years ago.

Gerard Judge, 62, from Lurgan, was sentenced to five years in prison back in 2015.

He was convicted on seven counts of indecent assault and one count of attempted buggery on aboy aged 14 in the early 1980s.
Judge, a then pub-landlord, denied the assaults took place.

The original ruling was overturned due to the lack of a proper direction to the jury about the complaint evidence in the case.

With the alleged victim’s mother now dead and his father not called to testify, there had been no independent evidence about their conversation.

Lord Chief Justice Sir Declan Morgan, who declared the conviction unsafe, said it was too difficult to rule on historic sex cases with no independent evidence.

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