‘Trial fair, justice done’ in child rape case

A Canterbury man has had appeals against his conviction and sentencing on five charges of raping two young girls dismissed by the Court of Appeal.

In December 2017 the man, who cannot be named to protect the identities of the children, was found guilty on five of six charges of raping the girls over a period of about two years.

In March 2018, he was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment in the Timaru District Court.

The judgment, released yesterday, states that in addition to interviews with the girls, court evidence included testimony from a doctor who found one of the girls had genital warts and was infected with Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), most likely contracted through sexual activity; and traces of semen found on both girls’ beds in positions consistent with their height.

Testing of the DNA found it was 600,000 million times more likely to belong to the defendant than a randomly selected person in New Zealand.

The man lodged an appeal against both conviction and sentence on the grounds that the interviews should have been excluded from trial because they were unreliable and the doctor’s evidence should be excluded because it could not be linked to him.

He also levelled several complaints against his lawyer, saying he ignored his client’s requests for a judge-alone trial and to move the venue to Christchurch; that he was distracted and late to court; that he failed to call additional witnesses; that he had failed to brief his client adequately; and that he failed to act when the defendant told him he’d mistakenly taken sleeping pills before giving evidence.

These accusations were largely disproved by records held by the lawyer and the court.

The man was judged to be not credible because he changed his testimony at trial from his earlier statements, the judgment says.

The court found that the victims’ evidential interviews were right to be included in the trial and that ‘‘assessing the reliability and credibility of what [they] said then became a matter for the jury’’.

Similarly, they found the doctor’s evidence ‘‘substantially helpful’’ in determining whether or not one of the girls had been raped and that the Crown made clear to the jury the evidence was circumstantial in the case against the defendant.

‘‘None of the five grounds of appeal against conviction has succeeded,’’ the judgment says.

‘‘We are satisfied that [the defendant’s] trial was fair, and that justice was done.’’

The Court of Appeal also upheld Judge Maze’s sentence which was based on the fact there were two victims, that both were young and vulnerable, and that extensive harm was caused to the girls who suffered post-traumatic stress disorder.

The judge also referred to historical cases of rape band three, which carries a sentence of 12-18 years, when sentencing the man to 15 years’ imprisonment.

‘‘[The defendant] might consider himself exceedingly lucky that the judge placed his offending in the middle of band three,’’ the judgment says.

‘‘Nor do any of the cases that we have reviewed provide any support for [his] appeal against sentence. Quite the contrary.’’

Testing of the DNA found it was 600,000 million times more likely to belong to the defendant than a randomly selected person in New Zealand.