The Supreme Court has upheld a father’s convictions for causing serious harm to his daughter, including for a head injury inflicted by his wife while he was away at work. It found no basis to disturb the jury’s verdict on the two counts before it on appeal.
The appeal concerned counts 6 and 7: serious harm arising from a blunt-force head injury on 2 July 2019, and serious disfigurement caused by burns during the period from 28 June to 2 July. The father was not at home when his wife inflicted the head injury. The Court of Appeal had reduced his sentence on those counts from 14 years to 13 years. The Supreme Court appeal was limited to whether the trial judge had properly directed the jury on common design.
The judgment recounts evidence that both parents had physically assaulted the child in the days before the head injury. Two of their other children described the father beating and strangling their sister, and the mother also beating, burning and choking her. The judgment says the head injury left the child permanently unable to attend to her bodily needs. The father denied participating in the attacks that caused the injuries at issue.
The father argued that he could not be liable for assaults carried out by his wife when he was absent, and that foresight that violence might continue could not by itself establish participation. The Director of Public Prosecutions argued that the parents had engaged in an ongoing shared enterprise of attacks.
The Supreme Court said each participant must have the mental state required for the offence. For causing serious harm, that can be intention or recklessness. Foresight alone does not automatically prove intention, the judgment said; a jury may consider it as evidence. Where recklessness is alleged, the prosecution must prove that the accused consciously took a serious and unjustifiable risk that the harm would occur.
Applying that test, the Court said the jury could treat the assaults by the wife as within the scope of a common design, given the pattern of violence in which both parents had participated. It also said the jury could find that the father had consciously disregarded the risk of serious injury when he left home, in those circumstances, while the violence continued. The Court concluded that the jury had been properly directed on recklessness and that the verdict should stand.
The judgment addressed only counts 6 and 7 in this appeal. The father’s other convictions, including child-cruelty counts, were not under appeal before the Supreme Court.