The Court of Appeal has dismissed M. A.’s appeal against his conviction for rape, rejecting all three grounds raised by the defence. The court found no error in admitting evidence of complaints made to both a friend and a garda, upheld the trial judge’s directions on complaint evidence and consent, and concluded that the verdict was not perverse.
M. A. was convicted by an 11-1 jury verdict in the Circuit Criminal Court in May 2019. A second count, sexual assault, resulted in a jury disagreement; the Director of Public Prosecutions later entered a nolle prosequi on that count. In July 2019, M. A. was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment, with the final 18 months suspended conditionally. This appeal concerned the rape conviction.
At trial, the complainant, identified in the judgment as “C”, said that on 29 October 2015 she repeatedly told M. A. to stop during a sexual encounter in a car at Dollymount Beach, and that he continued. M. A. denied rape in Garda interviews and in a prepared statement, saying the sex was consensual. The defence called no evidence.
One appeal ground challenged the admission of evidence from Detective Garda Karen Griffin about what C told her after first speaking to her friend, identified as “S”. The defence argued that the further complaint was inadmissible hearsay and served to repeat or strengthen the allegation. The Court of Appeal held that the two accounts were made close together, in different circumstances, and differed in detail without being internally inconsistent. It said the trial judge had been entitled to admit the evidence, while leaving the defence free to explore the differences before the jury.
The defence also argued that the trial judge’s directions wrongly assumed C had told the garda about oral sex, a point disputed at trial, and failed to explain the consent issue adequately. The appeal court said the charge, read as a whole, did not take the disputed question from the jury. It found the directions on consent clear and said the jury had received a thorough summary of the evidence.
Finally, the court rejected the claim that the guilty verdict was perverse or against the weight of the evidence. It said there was clear evidence on which the jury could convict and that the alleged contradictions concerned ancillary matters rather than the offence itself. The court dismissed the appeal against conviction; it made no change to the sentence in this judgment.