The Court of Appeal has quashed PK’s conviction for sexual assault, saying concerns about the handling of diary material and the jury directions on corroboration, taken together, meant it could not say confidently that the trial was fair and the verdict safe.
The court, in a judgment delivered on 31 July 2020, said the case would be listed in the coming days to deal with any application for a retrial. It did not decide whether a retrial should be ordered.
PK had been convicted on one count on 24 May 2017. The appeal concerned the trial judge’s refusal to allow the defence to put alleged diary entries to the complainant, who was PK’s daughter, and the judge’s treatment of corroboration in the charge to the jury. The Court of Appeal also considered an application to add the corroboration issue as a ground of appeal.
The defence said the diary entries, which it argued were written by the complainant, showed ill-will towards PK and could support its position that the allegation was unfounded. The prosecution objected, arguing that authorship and the chain of custody had not been established, relevance had not been shown, and the material was private. The trial judge refused the application at that stage, but left open the possibility of revisiting it if the relevance became clearer during cross-examination. The appeal court said that interim ruling nevertheless left defence counsel uncertain about whether she could pursue lines of questioning and described the result as unsatisfactory. The complainant’s authorship of the diary was never established, nor was the relevance of its contents.
On corroboration, the appeal court found that the trial judge had accurately explained the concept but gave the jury little guidance about whether the complainant’s distress or two socks photographed on the bedroom floor could amount to corroboration. The court said the socks were not corroborative because both the complainant’s account and PK’s alternative account involved her leaving the house in socks. It also said the distress might have been explained by an argument described in PK’s evidence.
The court stressed that neither concern alone might have been enough to undermine the trial. Together, however, they caused sufficient unease about its fairness and the safety of the verdict that the conviction had to be quashed.