Date rapist loses double appeal

A MAN who raped a woman he met through dating website Plenty of Fish has lost an appeal.

Aaron David Clarke was found guilty of digital rape after a three- day trial in Townsville District Court in July last year.

At the time of the rape, in October 2014, Clarke, was on bail for possessing child pornography in 2012 and soliciting child exploitation material from another woman whom he met online in 2013.

Clarke had also had sexually explicit online conversations with a 10- year- old girl in 2010.

He pleaded guilty to the child exploitation material charges and using a carriage service to transmit indecent communication.

Clarke was sentenced for all offences in November last year and appealed against the rape verdict and sentence, but the applications were dismissed by the Court of Appeal yesterday.

Justice Philip Morrison disagreed that the five- year jail term Clarke received for rape was “manifestly excessive”.

“In my view, there are several matters which lead to the conclusion that what took place was not only premeditated but carried out both brutally and callously,” he said.

“Clarke has never expressed the slightest remorse, or in- sight into his offending. That applies to the rape as well as the other offending.”

Justice Morrison said Clarke’s counsel had appealed the guilty verdict on four grounds, including that the judge had “adopted the role of prosecutor” by cross- examining Clarke. He rejected that.

“Assessed against the whole of the trial, I am unpersuaded that the learned trial judge’s questioning was such as to create ‘ a real danger that the trial was unfair’, or that there was ‘ such a departure from the due and orderly processes of fair trial as to amount to a miscarriage of justice’,” he said.

Clarke’s counsel also argued it was an unreasonable verdict, based on a text the complainant sent her friend after going to hospital for treatment of her injured genitalia.

The message read: “But it was consented. I’m okay. Just really sore. They’re putting me in a private room. I started bawling in front of the nurse.”

Justice Morrison said the woman told the jury she had meant she “consented to not being hurt”.

“The jury may well have concluded that the text message, seen in light of the phone call, did not undermine her evidence that there was no consent to the penetration of which she complained,” he said.