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Case against teacher accused of sex with pupil 'a mess'

26 May, 2009 08:26 AM
The case against a former Canberra teacher accused of having sex with her 14-year-old student was ''a mess'', a court heard yesterday.

The accused woman's barrister, Ken Archer, told the ACT Supreme Court there were significant problems with the material that prosecutors had presented to the court over the past eight days as evidence of his client's guilt.

Mr Archer also said the boy who claimed he had a sexual relationship with 43-year-old Tania Tominac over several months had a credibility problem.

The prosecution, run by Assistant Director of Public Prosecutions John Lundy, has run into trouble with Justice Malcolm Gray at several points during the trial and yesterday, in his closing submissions, Mr Archer described it as a mess.

''The indictment, in the way it has been presented by the Crown, is a mess,'' the barrister told the judge. ''It goes to the very central issue that there are problems with the young person's credibility.''

Tominac has pleaded not guilty to five counts of sexual intercourse with a person under the age of 16 years and to one count of maintaining a sexual relationship with a person under the age of 16 years.

The youth, who is now 18 and cannot be named, spent two days giving evidence by video link last week when he claimed he had an affair with the married mother of three while she was a science teacher at Saint Francis Xavier College and he was a student at the Florey school.

The boy also testified that he had received a large number of text messages, some of them sexually explicit, from Tominac during the period in question, but the prosecution's failure to retrieve any of the text messages or even tender Tominac's mobile phone records, sparked more criticism from Justice Gray yesterday.

''I don't know what I'm supposed to do with all this,'' the judge said of the telephone records that were tendered.

Mr Lundy asked the judge to disregard Tominac's evidence that she was innocent of the alleged offences, with the senior prosecutor telling Justice Gray that she was ''not a witness of truth''.

But he acknowledged that the lack of Tominac's phone records was a flaw in his case.

''It is a failing in the Crown's case that those records were not retrieved,'' Mr Lundy conceded from the bar table.

The prosecutors also came in for some harsh words from the bench on Friday after they had tendered 15 dildos and vibrators seized by police from Tominac's bedroom at her home without establishing any link between the items and the alleged offences.

The trial is due to end today with Justice Gray likely to reserve his verdict.

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