Convicted Illawarra paedophile Gaye Grant has been granted bail and given leave to withdraw her guilty plea in an extraordinary turn of events.
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Grant, 77, was sentenced at Wollongong District Court in December 2022 to six years and nine months' imprisonment, after pleading guilty to a historic charge of maintaining an unlawful relationship with a child stemming from when she taught at Albion Park's St Paul's Catholic Primary School in the 1970s.
In a Court of Criminal Appeal hearing in Sydney today, Justices Kristina Stern, David Davies and Stephen Campbell granted Grant bail and gave leave for her guilty plea to be withdrawn at a later date.
The turnaround follows the Court of Crimnal Appeal's decision in Helga Lam, where the court overturned the finding that the former Maroubra Bay High School teacher Helga Lam had committed 15 counts of indecent assault upon a male.
The Court held that the historical charge referred to an offence that can only have been committed by men upon other men.
This was the same offence that Grant was charged with.
Acting for Grant, defence barrister Steven Boland said that given the court's decision in Lam, there were special and exceptional circumstances that applied to Grant.
"The applicant is a person to whom the provision never applied."
Mr Boland said Grant could be released with no bail at all, given the charge could not apply, however the Justices ruled that Grant be released on bail, to be of good behaviour and to appear in court where required.
The court also heard Mr Boland's application for the court to grant leave for Grant to withdraw her guilty plea, entered in Wollongong in 2022.
"Ordinarily the assumption in relation to a guilty plea is it is an admission to the natural ingredients of a particular offence, in this case a natural ingredient of this particular offence is that the perpetrator is a male."
The court set a date in March for further hearing on the guilty plea, however Mr Boland foreshadowed the likely outcome of the case.
"One could be more ambitious than simply asserting it might succeed, but that it must succeed."
A final decision on Grant's guilt and conviction is yet to be reached.