FRESH EVIDENCE

A multiple-counts indictment under the Criminal Procedure Rules 2014 r.14.2(2), which allowed multiple instances of similar offences to be charged as a course of conduct, would not be properly drafted unless it specified a minimum number of occasions on which the offending was alleged to have happened. Otherwise, where a defendant was convicted on such an indictment, a sentencing judge could not know how many times the jury believed the offence to have been committed, and fairness would require him to sentence on the basis that it was more than once, but no more than twice.

A conviction for sexual assault was safe where an offender’s original solicitors had failed to obtain medical evidence showing that he was a diabetic and suggesting that his medical condition affected the answers he had given in interview, during which he had made partial admissions. The jury had been persuaded by the evidence the complainant gave, who had no reason to have lied.

The appellant’s conviction for the rape of his wife was unsafe, given fresh evidence from witnesses which cast doubt on the testimony given by the complainant.

In a trial of charges of sexual offences against the defendant’s daughter and granddaughter, the judge had been entitled to rule that the complainants’ various complaints were mutually cross-admissible. Further, the complainants’ evidence had not been contaminated.

An offender seeking to challenge his conviction for indecent assault on the ground that his actions had been the result of hypoglycaemia caused by his type 1 diabetes could not admit fresh expert evidence where it failed to deal the question at issue, namely, whether he had only recalled the assaults during his police interview because his solicitors had taken him through the disclosure document beforehand.

A conviction for sexual assault was quashed in circumstances where it was not clear that the jury would have reached the same verdict had it been aware of fresh evidence, admitted on appeal, that the offender suffered from Asperger’s syndrome.

A medical expert’s opinion that a 15-year-old girl’s injury to her hymen was diagnostic of blunt force trauma from sexual penetration had not been materially inaccurate and had not misled the jury in the trial of the appellant for raping the girl.

In the circumstances, the fact that a complainant had made an unfounded allegation of rape against an accused in a retrial did not cast doubt on the reliability of her evidence against him in an earlier trial so as to render unsafe his conviction for sexual assault in that earlier trial.

The acquittal of one of three men charged with multiple rapes of a woman over an evening had been explicable on the basis that he had joined the other two after the victim had ceased to show resistance. The judge had properly left the issue of reasonable belief in consent to the jury and had properly given a separate treatment direction.