Former County Down teacher jailed for indecently assaulting six children

By Paul Higgins

The former head of maths at St. Colmans College, described by a judge as a “persistent, predatory and opportunistic offender who abused young people,” was jailed for 13 years today (Wed).

Ordering the sentences for each of his six victims to be served consecutively to each other, Judge Brian Sherard told 75-year-old Patrick James Carton he had “stood back” from the case to consider the totality principle but that having done so, “I still consider that the global sentence is entirely in keeping with our course of persistent offending.”

Standing in the dock of Downpatrick Crown Court, sitting in Antrim, Carton appeared shocked at the sentence while his relatives close by in the public gallery held their head to their faces and cried at the sentence. 

Jailing the paedophile pensioner and imposing a Sexual Offences Prevention Order to run alongside the prison sentence, Judge Sherard told Carton that while he had been a “beacon of respectability,” had devoted his career to teaching maths to children “with some considerable success” and was held “in high esteem,” he added that given the convictions, “its clear that you have been offending from middle age.”

At the end of his seven week trial last March, the jury of seven women and five men deliberated for three hours and 40 minutes over two days before finding Carton unanimously guilty on 28 counts of indecent assault and by a majority decision of 11 to one on a further count of indecent assault, all of which were committed on various dates between 17 February 1983 and 30 June 2007.

The jury heard that Carton, from Marguerite Close in Newcastle and who taught at St. Colman’s in Newry and De la Salle in Downpatrick, had given private maths lessons to the six victims, abusing them in their own bedrooms. 

The jury heard similar testimony from each of the six victims, each of them teenagers at the time of the abuse, that Carto had a “star system” of discipline with three stars serving“as a warning,” four resulting in a smack, five stars got a smack over underwear and six stars meant the pupil was smacked on his or her a bare bottom.

The victims gave evidence that on occasions, Carton instructed them to lie on their bed where he smacked them but that in other incidents, they were “put across” Carton’s knee.

One of the females repeatedly assaulted by Carton told the jury she had repeatedly told Carton to stop but that it was “very hard” for a teenager to challenge a then 50 year-old man.

She said that when he first told her if his methods she was “shocked” and thought her tutor was “joking.”

“I told him I didn’t want to get smacked. I didn’t like it. It was not right,” she said.

“He said this would make me pass my maths. It would make my parents proud.”

She outlined how, when she was in lower sixth and before she got her A level results, the abuse escalated to sexual touching with Carton telling her it was her “award” for doing well in her lessons.

One woman gave emotional testimony the abuse she suffered at the hands of Carton had “ruined” her life while other victims told the court how they remembered their tears falling onto their work sheets and how the smacking left them unable to concentrate.

The male victim recounted how Carton pulled his pants down to smack him while being taught maths at his home in the 1980s, describing one specific incident where he had to “fight him off with his pants around his ankles” because the Carton would not stop hitting him.

During his police interviews Carton told police the various families had asked him to tutor their children through “word of mouth,” claiming that he did not smack the children to punish but in his mind it was to challenge the children and had always been done with the parents’ consent.

He denied gaining any sexual gratification or any criminal wrongdoing, telling police it was “the most effective method” that led to “the best results”.