Lithuanian man cleared in prostitute rape trial

The jury of four women and eight men acquitted him following more than four hours deliberation.

Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy discharged the accused man from the court. He exempted the jury from further jury service for five years and thanked it for its care and attention to the case.

The accused had denied two charges of raping the woman at the start of his six-day trial but the second count of anal rape charge was reduced to attempted anal rape following submissions by defence counsel, Mr Brendan Grehan SC (with Mr Sean Gillane BL).

The jury heard that after the accused said he wanted to find a prostitute, a taxi man phoned the woman and brought him to her south city suburban flat.

The accused paid her the €200 she asked and she told him to undress.

The woman alleges that the accused continued to have sex with her when she asked him to stop.

"He wasn’t listening to me," she said. "He just kept going. I was trying to get him off me but he was much heavier than me."

She agreed with Mr Grehan, in cross-examination, that "it never entered my head" at that stage to offer the accused his money back.

He told gardaí after his arrest in her flat: "I paid for sex and I got sex" and said he had no recollection of her asking him to stop. He denied he was rough with her and also denied her anal rape allegation.

She also agreed with Mr Grehan that the accused’s English "was not very good".

She said she had tried to talk to him and tell him, but accepted Mr Grehan’s suggestion that his English was not good enough for this conversation.

"I suppose he did not know because he can’t speak English," she said.

She denied she told Garda Ronan Murphy that the taxi-driver who called her said he had "a foreigner" for her.

She said it was only after speaking for a few minutes to the accused when he arrived that she realised he was not Irish.

"I don’t like to do non-Irish," she told Mr Grehan.