INCONSISTENT VERDICTS

An appellant who had faced a number of counts relating to offences arising out of the same sexual encounter had failed to establish that his conviction on two of those counts was rendered unsafe by the jury’s failure to reach a verdict on the remaining counts.

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.

In a case involving allegations of historic child sexual abuse constituting a course of conduct, it was not possible to see how a jury had reached a guilty verdict in relation to one count, but not-guilty verdicts in relation to others. The verdicts were inconsistent, the judge had erred in giving a Watson direction, and the conviction was quashed.

Guilty verdicts on two sample counts of rape relating to a six-year period were logically inconsistent with acquittals on four specific counts of rape against the same victim. A reasonable jury could not, on the paucity of the stand-alone evidence concerning the sample counts, be sure of guilt in relation to them if they rejected the specific events.

An offender’s conviction for assault by penetration of the vagina had not been inconsistent with his acquittal for offences of attempted rape and sexual assault by anal penetration. Nor could his conviction be overturned on the grounds that the judge had given the jury a Watson direction at the same time as a majority verdict direction, as there was no evidence that the jury had been pressured into delivering compromise verdicts.

It had not been logically inconsistent for a jury to find a man accused of sexual activity with a child guilty of having intercourse with her but not guilty of digitally penetrating her as they were separate incidents and the surrounding circumstances of the latter might have led the jury to be not sure beyond a reasonable doubt.

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.

A jury had not acted inconsistently in finding two young offenders guilty of oral rape but not guilty of sexual assault, even though the charges represented a sequence of events over the course of a 30-minute period and the central issue was consent. On the evidence, there was no logical inconsistency in the verdicts.

Where a family member had been convicted of the indecent assault of two children of the family, notwithstanding inconsistencies and conflicts in the evidence of the complainants, the judge had been entitled to leave the matter to the jury. In her directions to the jury, the judge had dealt fairly and clearly with the issue of alleged collusion, contamination and cross-admissibility, and had given commonsense guidance when reminding the jury that it was dealing with the evidence of children: the conviction was not unsafe as a result of the judge’s comments.