Sex offender’s appeal bid 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Tranter said he had faced a charge of ill-treating the child in 1983, but it was withdrawn.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 that the child had made an earlier allegation of sexual abuse against him and it was then dismissed.

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

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.

The court said Tranter had failed to raise issues of ‘‘public importance’’ and there was ‘‘no appearance of a miscarriage of justice’’ in how the Court of Appeal had evaluated his case.

The Supreme Court also dismissed his attempt to appeal his sentence, saying the availability of extended supervision orders and public protection orders could be an issue considered by the court, but ‘‘we do not see the present appeal as an appropriate case for that to occur’’.

‘‘In addition, we see nothing in the material advanced in support of the sentence appeal as providing any concern that a miscarriage of justice would arise if leave were not given on this point.’’

At Tranter’s 2016 sentencing, Justice David Gendall said Tranter had a ‘‘discernible pattern of sexual offending’’.

He had twice failed to complete treatment at Rolleston Prison’s Kia Marama Special Unit and, after being released from jail in 2007 for other sexual offending, he fled to the Philippines on a fake passport.