The Court of Appeal has quashed one of GS’s 30 sexual assault convictions while dismissing his appeal against the other convictions, finding that uncertainty over what the jury decided on two counts involving complainant A made one conviction unsafe to leave in place.
GS was convicted on 13 March 2020. In a judgment delivered on 8 February 2022, the court said the trial judge had considered that A’s evidence about one incident of digital penetration could not support a finding that it was non-consensual. The indictment did not make clear whether counts 9 and 10 concerned that incident or other alleged touching. The judge had directed the jury that A had agreed to the digital penetration and that it could not be treated as non-consensual, and later said she would not rely on it when sentencing.
The appeal court said the judge should either have told the jury to exclude the incident from consideration or withdrawn the count. Because it was impossible to know whether the jury’s verdict on count 9 relied on that evidence, the court quashed the conviction on that count. It said this was unlikely to have significant practical consequences because the judge had not relied on the incident for sentencing.
GS had been convicted of offences relating to four complainants identified as A, B, C and D. The appeal raised a number of other issues, including delay, missing communications between complainants, the death of an investigator, identification evidence relating to D, jury directions and the jury’s deliberations during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The court rejected those grounds. It found no basis to conclude that the investigator’s death or the unavailable Facebook messages had materially prejudiced the defence, and said the trial judge had been entitled to refuse applications to halt the trial or direct acquittals. On D’s single-incident count, it upheld the refusal to direct an acquittal, citing the circumstances of the identification and the judge’s cautionary direction to the jury.
The court also rejected the challenge concerning jury pressure during the pandemic. Jurors had been told they could deliberate into the following week and were under no pressure to reach a verdict. No juror raised concerns, the court said. It dismissed the appeal except for count 9.