The Court of Criminal Appeal has quashed eight sexual offence convictions against an anonymised man after ruling that his trial was unfair because the defence was prevented from asking limited questions about relevant evidence concerning the complainant.
G.K. was convicted in the Central Criminal Court in March 2005 of offences against L.S., who was aged between ten and fifteen during the period from 1991 to 1997. He denied having any improper sexual contact with her.
The 2005 proceedings were his third trial. The first jury failed to agree. Convictions at the second trial were later overturned because the defence had wrongly been refused a transcript of the first trial.
A new issue had emerged after that second trial. A psychologist’s victim impact report disclosed that L.S. had said she became sexually active with boys when she was twelve. The defence had not previously known this.
Before the third trial, G.K.’s lawyers sought permission to question L.S. about that history. They argued it was relevant because medical evidence showed that her hymen was broken, while the jury otherwise had no reason to consider that she had sexual contact with anyone other than G.K.
The trial judge refused permission, partly because the psychologist’s report was treated as privileged and partly because consent was not an issue.
Mr Justice Kearns, delivering the appeal court’s judgment, said those reasons did not properly address the statutory test. The question was whether excluding the evidence was unfair and whether admitting it might reasonably have affected the jury’s view of guilt.
The court stressed that a complainant’s previous sexual activity does not by itself undermine an allegation of abuse. However, in the particular circumstances, the undisclosed history and the medical evidence were relevant to assessing the plausibility and weight of the prosecution case.
The convictions were quashed. Having regard to three trials, two appeals and the time G.K. had already spent in prison, the court ordered no retrial.