The Court of Appeal has dismissed MG’s appeal against two convictions for anal rape, finding that the trial was not unfair or unsatisfactory and that the jury’s verdict was not unsafe.
MG was convicted after a trial on 18 May 2018 of anally raping his wife on the night and early morning of 18 and 19 December 2015. He was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment on 20 July 2018. The appeal judgment, delivered on 29 July 2019, dealt only with the convictions; it did not determine the separate appeal against sentence.
The appeal focused on the trial judge’s treatment of corroboration. MG argued that the judge should have warned the jury to be cautious about convicting on the complainant’s evidence without corroboration. The Court of Appeal said whether to give such a warning was for the trial judge’s discretion, and found no improper exercise of that discretion. It noted evidence relating to the December incident that was capable of amounting to corroboration, including evidence about the complainant’s distress and the events after she left the house.
The court also rejected arguments that the judge should have described the evidence of distress as weak corroboration, or that identifying potentially corroborative evidence without a formal warning gave the prosecution’s case undue prominence. It said the jury had been told that the evidence’s value was for them to decide, and that the judge had also noted there was no corroboration for the earlier counts.
The original indictment contained eight counts relating to alleged incidents in August, October and December 2015. The jury acquitted MG on counts without corroboration and convicted him only on the two December counts. The Court of Appeal said the trial judge’s charge, read as a whole, was not skewed or unbalanced. It dismissed the conviction appeal.