Sex offender’s appeal fails

A repeat child sex offender who fled to the Philippines after getting out of jail for earlier offending has lost another bid to appeal his convictions.

David Stanley John Tranter was found guilty by a High Court jury in 2015 of historical sexual offending against three children between 1982 and 1990.

His crimes included indecently assaulting a boy aged under 12, sodomising a boy, sexual connection with a girl aged under 16, inducing a boy under 12 to do an indecent act, and raping a teenage girl.

He was sentenced in 2016 to preventive detention, meaning he would stay behind bars until he was no longer deemed a threat.

Tranter tried to appeal his conviction and sentence in the Court of Appeal, claiming one of the complainants had a propensity for lying.

Tranter said he had faced a charge of ill-treating the child in 1983, but it was withdrawn.

The information was not presented to the jury in 2015 and Tranter argued it would have at least partially substantiated his claim at trial that the child had made an earlier allegation of sexual abuse against him and it was dismissed.

The Appeal Court declined Tranter’s appeal, saying the evidence was not enough to call his conviction into question.

Tranter also claimed a Ministry of Social Development document from 1988 suggested the complainant had been taken to a care facility in the North Island early that year, meaning he could not have been at Tranter’s home in North Canterbury when claimed.

The Court of Appeal said that document related to a period some years after Tranter’s offending against the child, so was ‘‘of no assistance in relation to the convictions that were subject to appeal’’.

Tranter, now aged 66, then applied for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court, but the case was rejected in a written decision released publicly yesterday.