Face it, this is unforgivable

THERE is no doubt that life is rarely ever the same for victims of sexual assault.

The memories, hard enough to move past on their own, can be compounded by having to relive the ordeal under cross-examination in a trial. Now comes news that the law has found another way to torment one such victim.

As we report today, a defendant found guilty in the County Court in Geelong on six counts of rape has had his convictions quashed.

Not because of some inadmissable evidence.

Not because of some overzealous police investigation.

No, the Court of Appeal found the man was denied the chance to view prospective jurors and challenge them at the start of his trial. That’s it. In Victoria, an accused has the right to challenge up to six potential jurors during the empanelment process. The Court of Appeal ordered a retrial on the grounds that neither Mr Cook nor his solicitor “were given an adequate opportunity to look closely at the faces of potential jurors while they were moving from their positions in the court to the jury box”.

It didn’t matter that Judge Gerard Mullaly, in handing down sentence, found that the man intended to “dominate and degrade” his victim, a mother in her mid-20s and said the woman was left broken afterwards and felt she’d never recover.

It didn’t matter that the victim herself in a statement said that she now felt “like a shell of someone”.

Today she would be entitled to wonder why such a legal procedural oversight was not brought up immediately.

Charles Dickens wrote more than 170 years ago that the law is an ass. It’s times like this when it feels like little has changed.