Marist Brother John Maguire Is Convicted, after Nine Jury Trials

Broken Rites
November 29, 2014

http://www.brokenrites.org.au/drupal/node/342

In Sydney District Court on 25 November 2014, Marist Brother John Dennis Maguire was convicted on child-sex charges. Maguire had been charged with multiple incidents of committing an act of indecency. The victim was a student at a Catholic boys' boarding school in Sydney (St Joseph's College, Hunters Hill) in the early 1980s.

A jury spent several days hearing evidence. The jury then found Maguire guilty on six of the incidents and not guilty on two other alleged incidents.

The case was heard by Judge P. Witford.

Pre-sentence proceedings are scheduled to be held on 27 February 2015. At this hearing, the prosecutor and the defence lawyer can tell the judge what kind of sentence should be imposed. Later, the judge would announce the sentence.

The court's case number is 201300295587.

Brother John Dennis Maguire (born on 13 December 1943) has spent his career in the Catholic order of Marist Brothers in Australia.

Between 1978 and the mid-1980s he was a teacher and dormitory master at a St Joseph's College, Hunters Hill, on Sydney's lower north-shore.

He has also spent time in Queensland (at Marist College, Ashgrove, in Brisbane) but the New South Wales court case relates only to incidents that occurred within New South Wales. Any complainants in Queensland would need to consult the detectives in the Child and Sexual Assault Unit of the Queensland Police.

Maguire's previous court appearances, re eight alleged victims

The 2014 court case was not Brother John Dennis Maguire first experience of sexual-assault charges regarding St Joseph's College. Twelve years earlier, in October 2002, Maguire had appeared in the Sydney Local Court, charged with multiple sexual offences against six other boys at this school. During the subsequent Local Court proceedings (conducted by a magistrate), Maguire was charged with a total 17 counts of assaulting boys aged between 11 and 13 while he was the Year 7 dormitory and form master (in charge of fifty boarders) in the early 1980s.

This Local Court process was not completed until June 2003.

During the 2002-2003 proceedings, it was alleged that Brother John Maguire would target boys who were homesick and that he would "comfort" these boys. Maguire had a bedroom adjoining the dormitory and it was alleged that a boy would be taken into this bedroom, where Maguire would interfere with the boy's penis. The alleged offences ranged from indecently touching the boys through to anal and oral penetration. Some of the boys told the Local Court that they complained about Maguire to another Marist Brother who was the headmaster in the early 1980s. But the school did not pass these complaints on to the police. Two decades later, in 2001, one of these ex-students finally managed to bring the matter to the attention of the NSW Police. Detectives then contacted former students of St Joseph's College to enquire whether they had been indecently assaulted. The detectives interviewed each of these students (separately) and obtained a sworn written statement from each of them, for submitting to the Local Court proceedings in 2002.

In June 2003, the Local Court magistrate committed Maguire to trial, to be conducted by a judge in the Sydney District Court.

When the District Court process began in late 2003, Maguire pleaded not guilty to all charges. Therefore the court would need to hold a jury trial. The Marist Brothers' lawyers told the judge that Maguire should not have to face all six of his accusers in a single trial with just one jury. The Marists' lawyers succeeded in obtaining separate trials, with a fresh jury for each complainant. (As a result, each jury would be unaware of the other alleged victims and would presume that there was only one complainant.)

The these trials (conducted by Judge Megan Latham) were held, one after the other, from November 2003 to July 2004.

Two juries failed to agree on a verdict and were discharged. The other six juries each returned a verdict of "Not Guilty". During the long months of court proceedings, the court placed a non-publication order on all the Maguire trials. Thus, media outlets were not allowed to mention the Maguire cases until the final jury had finished its work. When the media finally revealed (in July 2004) that there had been eight trials, all the juries (totalling 96 members) finally learned that there had been multiple alleged victims, not just one.

Despite the acquittals in 2003-2004, any of the complainants from 2003-2004 are still able to ask a suitably-experienced solicitor to make a civil demand against the trustees of the Marist Order, seeking compensation from the Marist Order (and its insurance company) for having inflicted Maguire upon these vulnerable students. The solicitor needs to be one who knows how to tackle the Catholic Church, because the church prefers its victims to take a smaller payout through its own in-house "Towards Healing" system.