The Court of Appeal has dismissed V.E.’s appeal against convictions for rape, anal rape and sexual assault, rejecting arguments that the jury should have received a corroboration warning and that the trial judge improperly read out the complainant’s evidence.
The judgment, delivered on 20 April 2021, says the complainant was aged 11 or 12 during the period in which the offences were alleged to have occurred. Her identity and other identifying details were redacted. The allegations were denied by V.E., who was convicted by a jury in the Central Criminal Court on 1 March 2019 after a trial that began on 19 February. The appeal judgment deals with the conviction appeal only; the court said it would hear submissions on the appeal against sentence in due course.
V.E. argued that the trial judge should have warned the jury about convicting on the complainant’s uncorroborated evidence. The defence cited the complainant’s mild learning disability, her unsworn evidence-in-chief, questions about whether her mother had supplied a narrative, her sister’s initial disbelief, and limits on cross-examination under ground rules set for questioning a vulnerable witness.
The Court of Appeal held that these matters, individually or together, did not show that the trial judge had erred. It said the suggestion that the mother had coached the complainant was a defence proposition, not an established fact, and that the cited exchange reflected confusion about how a question had been framed. The judgment also noted that the defence had not objected to the ground rules at trial and had not identified a line of questioning it was prevented from pursuing.
The court rejected a second ground concerning the trial judge’s reading of the complainant’s evidence to the jury. It found no material difference between a judge recapping live evidence from notes and summarising a video-recorded interview, and noted that the defence cross-examination was also read to the jury.
The court further refused arguments that the jury’s verdict was against the weight of the evidence or perverse. It noted that the defence had not sought a direction at the close of the prosecution case and concluded that the trial evidence gave no basis to interfere with the verdict. The conviction appeal was dismissed; the judgment does not determine the separate appeal against sentence.