The Court of Appeal has dismissed S.C.’s appeal against conviction, rejecting a challenge to the trial judge’s decision not to give the jury a corroboration warning.
S.C. was convicted on 18 October 2022 of six counts of indecent assault, 14 counts of sexual assault and 13 counts of rape. The appeal concerned only whether the trial judge erred by refusing a corroboration warning.
The complainant, S.C.’s first cousin, alleged that S.C. sexually abused him over about 10 years, beginning when the complainant was five. The court’s judgment said the two families lived in adjacent houses and were close. At trial, the complainant said he regularly went to S.C.’s home and bedroom, where the offending occurred. He said the abuse began with sexual assaults, escalated over time and stopped when he was about 14 or 15 and began avoiding S.C.
The complainant described distress during his life, which escalated in 2019. He was referred for counselling and initially told the counsellor that he had not been sexually abused. He explained in evidence that he had been unable to say so at first. The judgment records that he disclosed the abuse later in counselling that year and told his mother in July 2019.
S.C. denied the allegations. At trial, the defence relied on family members’ movement between the houses, the aunt’s care of S.C., the location of a computer used for video games and S.C.’s mobility difficulties. The complainant later confronted S.C. and other family members; the judgment says S.C. denied the offending and the complainant punched him.
On appeal, S.C. argued that the judge had wrongly treated delay and corroboration warnings as the same issue. The appeal submissions also cited the age of the allegations, the absence of recent complaint evidence and the complainant’s initial denial to the counsellor. The prosecution argued that the evidence did not warrant a corroboration warning and that an appeal court should intervene only if the trial judge used an incorrect legal basis or was patently wrong in fact.
The Court of Appeal found that the trial judge had considered delay and corroboration separately. It said the complainant’s initial response to the counsellor had been explained in evidence and did not require a warning. The court concluded that declining to give the warning was within the trial judge’s discretion, rejected the sole ground pursued at the hearing and dismissed the appeal. The judgment does not revisit the convictions themselves beyond that appeal ground.