The Court of Appeal has dismissed M. L.’s appeal against 60 convictions for sexual assault involving six sisters. It found that the trial judge’s corroboration warning was inadequate, but said the defects operated in the appellant’s favour and did not justify setting aside the verdicts.
The judgment, delivered by Sheehan J. on 27 April 2015, dealt only with the conviction appeal. The Director of Public Prosecutions had separately sought review of the sentences as unduly lenient; that issue was outside the appeal considered in this judgment.
The convictions followed an 18-day trial and a majority jury verdict. The offences were found to have occurred over a ten-year period between 1994 and 2005. The six complainants alleged that the abuse took place while M. L. lived in their family home as their mother’s partner. The judgment said all but one of the offences occurred in the home; the exception was an incident in the appellant’s car.
M. L. challenged the convictions on several grounds, including the trial judge’s handling of prosecution counsel’s closing remarks about an older sister who had not complained, the judge’s treatment of defence arguments about complainant credibility, and the lack of a direction that jurors should not return a verdict with which they disagreed. The Court of Appeal rejected those grounds, finding the jury had been adequately directed on the defence case and that the additional direction sought was not required.
The court’s main discussion concerned corroboration. It said the trial judge had defined corroboration and partly connected the warning to the delay in complaints, but had wrongly told the jury that, apart from limited areas, there was no evidence they could consider corroborative. The judgment identified evidence about sexual items, requests for coffee before alleged assaults, one sister witnessing abuse, and the mother’s evidence about items kept by the appellant as material that might have been capable of corroborating another complainant’s account. Whether evidence amounted to corroboration remained for the jury, subject to issues including possible collusion or innocent contamination.
The Court of Appeal held that the warning did not adequately explain the risks in general or in the circumstances of the case, and failed to point out several areas of evidence that might have been considered. However, it said the effect of what the trial judge told the jury benefited the appellant. The appellant had not raised those particular shortcomings at trial, and his requested correction would itself have led to further error in his favour. The court therefore dismissed the conviction appeal.