The Court of Appeal has quashed an accused man’s convictions for four counts of rape and one count of sexual assault, ruling that the jury may not have properly understood how to assess lies he told in Garda interviews. The court directed a retrial.
The convictions followed a trial concerning offences said to have occurred on 8 May 2020 at an address in the west of Ireland. The man had received concurrent prison terms of 10 years for each rape count and one year for sexual assault.
The judgment records that the complainant and the accused had arranged to meet after communicating on social media. She had made clear that she did not want sexual activity. Her evidence was that he went on to have intercourse with her by force on four occasions despite her telling him to stop. The accused told Gardaí that consensual intercourse had occurred once.
At trial, the prosecution relied heavily on lies and changing accounts the accused gave during interviews. The trial judge told jurors that lies could support the prosecution case if they were not sure there was an innocent explanation. The accused’s counsel objected after the charge, arguing that the direction was wrong and could confuse the jury. The judge declined to give a further direction.
The appeal court said the direction was erroneous: lies could be relied on only if jurors were sure, to the criminal standard of proof, that there was no innocent explanation. It acknowledged that the jury charge had to be considered as a whole and that the rest of it was beyond criticism. But it was not satisfied that other parts of the direction removed the concern about jurors’ understanding of this crucial issue.
The appeal notice included three other grounds: refusal of an application under section 3 of the Criminal Law (Rape) Act 1981, admission of evidence of a recent complaint to Garda Bríd Fitzgerald, and permission to amend the indictment. The judgment says the first and third grounds were not pursued at the hearing. The court did not consider it necessary to decide the second ground.
Finding that the trial was unsatisfactory and the verdict unsafe, the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions and directed a retrial. The judgment does not determine the accused’s guilt or report the result of any retrial.