Suspended sentence for security guard sex assault

A security guard has been given a one-year suspended sentence for sexually assaulting an Italian woman after he posed as a bouncer and insisted on taking her home because she had too much to drink.

Carl Murphy (aged 26) approached the woman who was outside a Dublin pub with her two male Polish friends and told them he was a bouncer and he would bring her home.

Garda Seamus Houlihan told Ms Mary Rose Gearty BL, prosecuting, at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court, that the men did not want to leave her alone with Murphy so they travelled in the taxi with him.

They later told gardaí that Murphy was "quite aggressive" and insisted on bringing her home with them and he then helped her friends put her into bed.

The men made sure Murphy left the house with them and waited around the area before they too went home but the victim later woke up to find him sexually assaulting her.

Murphy then asked her for sex and when she refused he took a mobile phone from the house and left.

Gda Houlihan said the woman had since returned to Italy and although she was traumatised by the event she was confident this would recede with time.

Murphy, of Church Road, East Wall, Dublin 3, pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting the now 24-year-old victim and to burglary at her home on May 1, 2005. He was registered as a sex offender.

He had no previous convictions and had €2,600 in court to offer the victim as "a practical expression of his remorse".

Judge Patricia Ryan said that Murphy had taken advantage of the woman when she was in a vulnerable condition and said that the offence had "an element of pre-meditation".

She accepted that Murphy’s behaviour was "completely out of character" and acknowledged his expression of remorse.

Judge Ryan sentenced Murphy to one year in prison which she suspended on strict conditions.

Mr Blaise O’Carroll SC, defending, told Judge Ryan that Murphy fully accepted that what he did was "completely wrong".