Former Sydney magistrate and convicted child sex offender Graeme Curran has been granted his freedom after his two-year and four-month sentence was slashed upon the partially upheld appeal. The appeal decision reduced his sentence to 16 months with a non-parole of nine months, meaning with time served he was immediately released. 

The appeal court ruled a jury should have held a reasonable doubt about whether the former magistrate performed fellatio on a schoolboy and held him down while he tried to kiss him during a 1982 sailing trip. There were nine counts in total, occurring when Mr Curran was in his early 30s and the boy was aged between 13 and 16 years. 

In reasons for the decision, published this week, justice John Basten said the District Court’s jury should have held a reasonable doubt about the two charges because the boy said his memory about the evening only came back to him after being “concealed within the black box of my subconscious” for nearly 40 years.  

“The complainant failed to make any allegation of an act of fellatio in spite of a number of opportunities to do so. Of even greater significance was that, when the complainant first spoke to police in 2004, he specifically denied oral sex had ever occurred,” Justice Basten explained in the court documents, released a month after the appeal. 

The court did not quash the other counts, all of which detailed incidents of child sexual offences. In one instance, the boy would sleep at Mr Curran’s house, where they both shared a bed and slept naked. A ritual developed of Mr Curran “massaging the [boy’s] naked body in the morning”, an assault which was caught by a builder in the home. 

Mr Curran was taught by the boy’s father and stepfather. After leaving school, he would become close with the family, even being a guest at the second wedding. He said that at that stage he did not know the children well enough but would soon go on to attend family outings and gift the boy and his siblings with trips and gifts. 

“Both the applicant and the [boy] saw their relationship as similar to that of father and son, or perhaps uncle and nephew. There is no doubt that it was a relationship of trust and one in which [Mr Curran] took the [boy] on recreational outings,” the court said. 

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Justice Basten also found the two statements by the Crown prosecutor during the trial, including that Mr Curran had a weakness for “boys in general”, did not give rise to any miscarriage of justice because it was followed by thorough directions by the trial judge. 

In agreeing with Justice Basten, Justice Robert Allan Hulme said he felt he needed to add that it is “startling” the senior barrister who appeared for the Crown “could make such fundamentally flawed submissions to the jury” in this case. 

Mr Curran, who has been suspended from the Local Court bench since his charges in 2017, recently had his name removed from listed magistrates on the NSW Local Court website, where it had remained throughout trial and incarceration.

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Voting is now open for The Lawyers Weekly Award, to be presented to one individual for making substantial, consequential achievements in advancing the Australian legal profession since 2000. Finalists for this prestigious award have been confirmed as those listed below. To vote for your preferred winner, click here. 

Julian Burnside AO QC (barrister)

Bernard Collaery (barrister, former Attorney-General of the Australian Capital Territory)

Kate Eastman SC (barrister and co-founder, Australian Lawyers for Human Rights)

The Hon Robert French AC (former chief justice, High Court of Australia)

Sue Kench (global chief executive, King & Wood Mallesons)

The Hon Chief Justice Susan Kiefel AC (chief justice, High Court of Australia)

The Hon Michael Kirby AC CMG (former justice, High Court of Australia)

Jane Needham SC (barrister and former president, NSW Bar Association)

Geoffrey Robertson AO QC (barrister)

Professor Gillian Triggs (assistant secretary-general, United Nations and former president, Australian Human Rights Commission)