Teen who attacked female garda gets nine months
A teenage boy, who viciously attacked a female garda and dragged her along the ground by her shirt after he taunted her with lewd comments, has been detained for nine months.
He had punched the garda twice in her stomach after being cautioned for making abusive comments to her, the Dublin Children’s Court had heard.
Judge Michael Connellan had heard that the boy, who was 13 at the time of the incident, but now aged 16, had verbally abused the female garda from Fitzgibbon Street Station. When she went to caution him, he called her a “dirty slapper” and went on to say: “I bet half the station have been up on you.”
As a result a group of youths with him, started to laugh and jeer at her.
When she went to arrest the boy for breach of the peace, he ran, but turned back when he saw her colleague Garda Paraic Lynch approaching from another direction. He ran straight back at her and punched her hard in the stomach with both fists.
She doubled over and he then grabbed her shirt and dragged her onto her knees and pulled her along the ground. As a result she banged her shoulder and head against a kerb.
The Garda’s knees were bleeding; she had to drag herself up onto her feet and was dazed following the assault.
Garda Lynch, prosecuting, had also said that two days later he went to the boy’s home to arrest him but was told by his mother that he had been away all night and had not come home.
A search of the flat revealed the boy hiding behind a laundry basket at the rear of their flat.
The boy had denied assaulting the female garda causing harm at a flat complex in north inner city Dublin in August 2002 as well as a breach of the peace on the same occasion.
He was convicted at a hearing in the Children’s Court in April 2003 and the case had been adjourned pending probation reports until today.
Garda Lynch said that since this incident the boy has been convicted on 19 separate offences and is also facing a prosecution over an alleged armed robbery.
At the boy’s hearing Judge Connellan had said the boy acted the “great man in front of a crowd” but hid like a “coward” when the gardaí came to arrest him.
Pleading for leniency yesterday, defence counsel Mr Seamus Clarke told Judge Connellan that the boy was very young at the time of the assault and had educational problems. He suffers from Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder and had been the subject of expert behavioural assessments.
Detaining the boy, Judge Connellan said the teenager had been convicted for further offences since the attack on the garda and a probation report and highlighted that he was also re-offending and associating with older individuals who were negative influences.
