Lawyers for a female paedophile teacher in New South Wales have argued her conviction for having a sexual relationship with a child in the 1970s should be quashed. It follows a ruling in a similar case also involving a female teacher where the state's highest court found an offence that existed at the time doesn't didn't apply to women.
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00:00 This is Gay Grant. Now, she's a former teacher from a Catholic school in the 70s in New South
00:06 Wales. She was spoken to by police in 2021 and she ended up pleading guilty to having
00:12 an unlawful sexual relationship with an underage boy back in the 70s. Now, it happened between
00:17 77 and 79. She is now in her late 70s and earlier this year, she was released on bail.
00:24 She was actually serving a jail sentence of at least three years and four months, but
00:28 she was released on bail pending this appeal. She's appealing her conviction and the reason
00:33 why she is launching this appeal is because of a separate case, which is pretty similar.
00:38 That other case also involves a former teacher called Helga Lamb and she was accused of sexually
00:43 abusing four underage male students also in the 1970s. Now, Helga Lamb took her case to
00:50 the Court of Criminal Appeal in New South Wales and that court ended up holding that
00:55 the charge that she was facing, which is indecent assault upon a male, does not apply to conduct
01:01 committed, allegedly committed by female perpetrators by, so female perpetrators upon a male complainant.
01:09 Now, that meant that Helga Lamb's indictment was quashed. So, Gay Grant's lawyers are pointing
01:14 to that as a precedent and they've got up in the Court of Criminal Appeal today and
01:18 said that because of the reasoning in that case to do with Helga Lamb, that their client's
01:23 guilty plea is devoid of any legal effects and that should mean that her conviction should
01:29 also be quashed. The same courts of the Court of Criminal Appeal in New South Wales in dealing
01:34 with her bail application earlier when Gay Grant launched this appeal and then sought
01:38 bail, some other judges in that court made a comment that in light of the ruling in the
01:44 Helga Lamb case, this appeal would be most likely to succeed and because of the way the
01:48 court is obviously going to follow the previous decisions and precedents, it seems almost
01:53 inevitable that this conviction will not stand. Her lawyer did though today say that
01:59 it would be open to the court to remit the matter back to the district court, so the
02:03 lower court, to go through another trial, although the only other alternative and the
02:07 preferred alternative is to quash the conviction altogether.
02:10 [BLANK_AUDIO]