The Court of Criminal Appeal rejected Eamon Cooke’s application for leave to appeal convictions on 42 assault counts involving two complainants. It also refused his application to introduce extracts from a later-published book as fresh evidence and add related appeal grounds.
The convictions were entered on 28 February and 1 March 2007. The offences were said to have occurred between 1974 and 1978. Cooke received a total 10-year prison term, with credit for time already spent in prison. An earlier conviction on the same charges had been quashed in May 2006 because of the trial judge’s directions to the jury.
Cooke sought to rely on book extracts containing a complainant’s account of an alleged further assault and her recollection of seeing him in St James’s Hospital’s intensive care unit in 1983. The court refused to admit the hospital-related evidence. Hospital records showed Cooke had been admitted in 1984 for five days after a leg injury. The court concluded he knew of that admission but had not disclosed it to his solicitor. It said the discrepancy between 1983 and 1984 was not critical to the issue.
The court also refused the application based on the account of a possible attempted anal rape. It stressed that it was not deciding whether the book’s account was true. The judges said the passage did not allege penetration and were not satisfied that it could have had a material and important influence on the trial’s outcome. They considered that using it to challenge the complainant could have allowed damaging rebuttal evidence and might not have created a reasonable doubt for the jury.
On the original appeal grounds, the court refused leave on the challenge to the trial judge’s directions about corroboration. It held that one complainant’s direct evidence of assaults witnessed or experienced in the presence of the other could support the other’s account, provided the jury accepted that evidence as credible and independent. The court said an allegation of collusion did not, by itself, remove corroboration from consideration.
The court also considered the challenge to the directions on delay. It said the applicant had not met the requirements for raising that ground after no further requisitions were made following the jury’s recharge. Even considering the substance, it found the judge’s warning adequate in the circumstances. The court said the jury had also heard evidence it could use to assess the competing accounts and concluded there was ample evidence to support the convictions and no miscarriage of justice.
The court rejected the application for leave to appeal. It did not conduct a new trial or overturn the convictions.