The Court of Appeal has dismissed K.K.’s appeal against four sexual assault convictions, ruling that the trial judge was entitled to refuse a corroboration warning and to let the trial proceed.
The judgment, delivered on 10 May 2018 by Mr Justice Birmingham, said the court was not persuaded that the trial had been unfair or unsatisfactory, or that the verdicts were unsafe. The convictions followed a trial in the Central Criminal Court and were recorded on counts one, four, seven and eight of a 15-count indictment. The appeal concerned the trial judge’s refusal to give a corroboration warning and refusal to halt the trial on a P.O’C. application.
The complainant alleged that the four offences occurred at her family home in Tallaght between September 2004 and when she was 14 or 15. The Court of Appeal did not reconsider the jury’s verdicts as a fresh trial; it considered whether the trial judge’s decisions provided grounds to overturn the convictions.
The corroboration issue arose after the defence highlighted differences between the complainant’s Garda statement and a typed record of a 2013 interview with an HSE social worker. The social worker had made handwritten notes but did not retain them; she prepared the typed record later, did not read it back to the complainant and did not ask her to sign it. The complainant disputed some of the recorded words. The trial judge declined to give a warning after hearing from both the complainant and the social worker. The appeal court held that the judge had considered the issue carefully and was entitled to decide as he did.
The defence’s remaining P.O’C. argument focused on Gardaí not obtaining employment records to check K.K.’s account that he worked at a warehouse during the 2006 World Cup. The trial judge directed the jury to assume K.K. was employed at the relevant time and to give him the benefit of the resulting doubt when considering count seven. The appeal court said the alleged incident was brief and that the possibility of a visit during a work break could not be excluded. It concluded that the missing records did not require the trial to be stopped and that the trial judge was entitled to give directions to the jury instead.
The court also agreed that questions about telephone records and whether flour was available at a garage shop did not justify halting the trial. Those issues were not pursued as independent grounds on appeal. The appeal was dismissed.