The Court of Appeal has dismissed Martin Sherlock’s appeal against his rape conviction, rejecting his argument that the trial judge should have given the jury a “good character” direction. The judgment addressed the conviction appeal only; Sherlock’s appeal against his five-year sentence was not dealt with.
Sherlock was convicted after a contested trial in the Central Criminal Court in May 2018 and sentenced on 2 July 2018. The only issue remaining in the conviction appeal was whether the absence of a direction based on the English case R v Vye made the conviction unsatisfactory.
At trial, the complainant said she had insisted that intercourse take place only with a condom. The prosecution case was that Sherlock penetrated her without one and without her consent. The judgment describes the sexual intimacy as consensual but says the prosecution alleged that the intercourse in question was not. Sherlock pleaded guilty to stealing the complainant’s mobile phone as he left the premises.
Sherlock gave evidence about his background and said he had never been in trouble with the law and had no previous convictions. His counsel asked the trial judge to give the jury a direction that good character could support Sherlock’s credibility and could be relevant to whether he was less likely to have committed the offence. The trial judge declined, saying such a direction was not part of Irish law and could add unnecessary complexity. The Court of Appeal said the trial judge was correct.
The appeal court said Irish law does not require a good-character direction in every case where an accused has no previous convictions. A defence may put character in issue, and a judge may address it as part of the defence case where it is central. But that does not make it a mandatory warning. The court also noted that the defence had placed little emphasis on character at trial, and that Sherlock had admitted lying to the complainant about a non-existent brother and had pleaded guilty to stealing her phone.
The court considered the development of the Vye practice in England and Wales and approaches in other common-law jurisdictions. It was not persuaded that Irish law should adopt a mandatory direction, observing that it saw no empirical evidence that a person without previous convictions was more likely to be telling the truth or that jurors generally needed such an instruction.
The Court of Appeal dismissed the conviction appeal. The judgment does not determine the separate appeal against sentence.