The Court of Appeal has dismissed Philippe Cauneze’s fifth attempt under the Criminal Procedure Act 1993 to challenge his aggravated sexual assault conviction from March 2000.
The November 2017 application was the third such application dealt with by the Court of Appeal and the fifth brought by Cauneze overall.
The court said the history of the case had already been examined in detail in a December 2015 judgment. On that occasion, it dismissed Cauneze’s application after finding that he was attempting to relitigate matters already decided and that no new or newly discovered fact had been produced.
Cauneze made another application which was dismissed in April 2016. The court then described the repeated proceedings as a flagrant abuse of process.
In the latest application, Cauneze again raised issues he said were new. The Court of Appeal rejected that characterisation. It said the matters relied upon had been recurring themes in previous applications, including his challenges to the authenticity of the transcript of his trial and assertions that the book of evidence had been falsified.
The court also recalled observations made in an earlier judgment in December 2011. That judgment recorded that Cauneze had given a full account of the relevant events at his trial and that the trial judge considered his own evidence sufficient to support conviction on the aggravated sexual assault charge. The jury had acquitted him of other, more serious offences.
Against that background, the Court of Appeal said it remained difficult to identify any new fact capable of materially affecting the conviction.
The judges concluded that the latest application was also vexatious and dismissed it. The judgment did not reopen the underlying conviction, make any finding on sentence or identify any further avenue of relief.