The Court of Appeal has dismissed JH’s appeal against convictions on seven counts of rape, attempted rape and sexual assault, declining to reassess the jury’s view of the evidence.
JH was convicted in the Central Criminal Court on 5 February 2015: three counts of rape, one of attempted rape and three of sexual assault. An eighth count ended in a directed verdict of not guilty and was not in dispute in the appeal.
The appeal argued that the jury’s verdicts were perverse and contrary to a reasonable view of the evidence. The court heard that JH had been charged with repeatedly raping and sexually assaulting his niece between 1984 and 1988. The niece’s date of birth was described in the judgment as very late in 1977.
A central issue concerned two alleged incidents in which the complainant said her cousin, Ms K, was present and was also abused. One allegation concerned a sitting room at JH’s house; the other concerned a steel galvanised shed behind the grandparents’ house. The complainant placed the shed incident in 1984 or 1985, linking its timing to her grandfather’s death.
The defence called Ms K, who denied witnessing anything untoward involving the complainant and denied being abused herself. The Court of Appeal said the conflicting accounts had properly been left to the jury. The guilty verdicts showed that jurors accepted the complainant’s account beyond reasonable doubt, the judgment said.
The appeal also referred to evidence from JH’s former wife, Ms RM. Defence counsel had challenged her accounts to Gardaí, including by questioning whether much of her statements concerned alleged wrongdoing against herself rather than the complainant. After Ms RM made a reference in court to what JH had done to her children, no application was made to discharge the jury. The trial judge proposed to tell jurors that Ms RM had come to court “with an agenda”; defence senior counsel said he was happy with that approach.
The appeal court said the former wife’s evidence was not advanced as a standalone ground, but as part of the overall case. It declined the invitation to take a different view of the evidence from the jury, noting that it had only the transcript and the limitations that involved. The appeal was dismissed; the court did not conduct a retrial or make new findings on the underlying allegations.