Barrister’s appeal against disbarment over sexual harassment of pupils dismissed

A barrister who was disbarred after he was found to have sexually harassed two pupils and a person on mini-pupillage has had his appeal dismissed.

Robert Michael Kearney, called in 1996 and who practised in criminal law, was disbarred by the Bar Tribunal and Adjudication service following a tribunal’s sanctions hearing in December 2024.

Kearney appealed against the sanction on five grounds, including that he was afforded ‘insufficient credit’ for mitigation, his rehabilitation was ‘wrongly characterised as “personal mitigation”’ and the tribunal had failed to give any or sufficient consideration to the totality principle.

However in Robert Kearney v The Bar Standards Board, Mrs Justice Hill, sitting in Manchester, said she did not find the way in which the tribunal assessed Kearney’s evidence of rehabilitation or his wider character evidence ‘in any way “wrong”’.

She added that there was ‘nothing wrong’ in how the tribunal approached the totality issue or how ‘identified and applied the relevant mitigating factors’, adding: ‘Their approach to this issue was entirely consistent with the Sanctions Guidance and the particular facts of the appellant’s case.’

Referring to the tribunal’s sanction, the judge said the tribunal’s ‘detailed and clear reasons…fully explain why the tribunal did not consider that a further period of suspension was the appropriate sanction’.

She added: ‘The tribunal was considering an unusually serious situation in that [Kearney] was being sanctioned for two disciplinary cases involving sexual misconduct towards one mini-pupil and two pupils, and had already previously been sanctioned for sexual misconduct twice by way of sexual harassment of a mini-pupil and a pupil.’

Kearney first appeared before the tribunal in 2018 in which he was reprimanded and ordered to pay a £1,000 fine. In March 2021 he appeared before the tribunal over allegations of inappropriate behaviour and was suspended for six-months and fined £3,000. He appealed the sanction which was dismissed. Kearney appeared before the tribunal again and a consolidated sanctions hearing was held in January 2023. He successfully appealed his sanction of disbarment and the sanctions hearing was relisted to December 2024 when the Bar Tribunal and Adjudication service disbarred him.

The judge said: ‘The tribunal, when considering what sanction to impose, was fully entitled to have regard for his pattern of misconduct, and to reflect on the question of why the previous investigations and sanctions had been ineffective in preventing his misconduct towards Pupil A and Pupil B. For cases within the upper range of seriousness, which both cases were for the reasons the tribunal gave, the Sanctions Guidance made clear disbarment was the “indicative sanction”.

‘In those circumstances the sanction of disbarment was not manifestly excessive; nor was it wrong or clearly inappropriate, which is the test applicable to this appeal.’

Dismissing the appeal, the judge said Kearney’s disbarment was neither 'wrong' nor 'clearly inappropriate'.