The Court of Appeal has dismissed an appeal by NC against two convictions for indecent assault, concluding that the trial was not unfair and the verdicts were not unsafe.
The convictions followed a retrial that began on 3 April 2017. A jury acquitted NC on counts 1 to 8 and convicted him on counts 9 and 10. Those counts concerned alleged indecent assaults on dates unknown within the periods 1 October to 31 December 1985 and 1 January to 31 March 1986. NC received a six-and-a-half-year prison sentence and appealed against the convictions.
The appeal court rejected four grounds. It accepted that the complainant’s account included alleged conduct beyond the dates in the indictment, but found no resulting unfairness. The court said the prosecution case had been that NC engaged in sustained child abuse, and that the additional evidence did not introduce a different kind of allegation.
NC also argued that the trial judge’s comments about GP Dr John Conway improperly undermined his evidence. The doctor had no notes of the examination at issue and described his recollection as vague. He recalled examining a boy of about 10, possibly younger, and said he was not an expert in genital trauma. The appeal court held that the judge’s intervention and directions were permissible clarification. It said the doctor’s recollection remained available to the defence, subject to its vagueness.
A further ground concerned the judge’s response to a jury request for dates and details of the complainant’s grandmother’s hospital stay. The appeal court noted that there was no recording of the exchange and no evidence before it of precisely what had been said, beyond the parties’ submissions. It was not persuaded that anything improper had occurred or that the trial’s fairness was affected.
The final ground challenged limits on cross-examination. The appeal court upheld the trial judge’s ruling that questions about the complainant’s adult conduct towards a former partner and other collateral matters were not relevant to whether he had been abused as a child. It rejected the claim that curtailing those questions made the trial unfair.
The court dismissed the appeal. Its decision concerns the safety and fairness of the convictions; it does not alter the jury’s acquittals on counts 1 to 8.