The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Harris indecent assault verdict overturned
Credibility of Crown witness in original case was called into doubt
Disgraced entertainer Rolf Harris has had one of 12 indecent assault convictions overturned by the Court of Appeal.
Three judges in London ruled the conviction was unsafe, but they rejected applications by Harris, 87, to challenge 11 other convictions.
Lord Justice Treacy, Mrs Justice Mcgowan and the Recorder of Preston, Judge Mark Brown, announced their decision yesterday.
The artist and musician was convicted of 12 indecent assaults at London’s Southwark Crown Court in June 2014, one on an eight-year-old autograph hunter, two on girls in their early teens, and a catalogue of abuse against another girl over a period of 16 years.
Harris was jailed for five years and nine months after being convicted of assaults that took place between 1968 and 1986.
The Australian-born television presenter has since been released from that sentence.
He was not in court for the ruling by the appeal judges.
The prosecution did not seek a retrial on the one count and the judges agreed that a further trial would not be in the public interest.
The quashed conviction related to an allegation that Harris indecently assaulted an eight-year-old girl in 1969 when she attended an event at a leisure centre in Portsmouth.
Stephen Vullo QC, for Harris, had presented four grounds of appeal at a recent hearing, which Harris attended.
One ground was that there was fresh evidence supporting Harris’s case, and complaint was also made about a direction given to the jury by the trial judge relating the credibility of prosecution witness David James.
Mr James was the only person, apart from the complainant, who gave evidence about the entertainer attending the leisure centre at the relevant time.
Lord Justice Treacy said the late Mr James was an “important witness” on count one at the trial, and if material now known about him had been “obtained and disclosed at the correct time it is very doubtful that Mr James would have been called as a witness”.
Lord Treacy added that if Mr James was “removed from the picture”, the complainant “is left on her own in asserting an encounter with Mr Harris at the community centre in circumstances where there was a body of evidence to the contrary”.
The court’s view was that the evidence about Mr James “operates to weaken the Crown’s case on the important issue of whether Rolf Harris ever attended the community centre in 1969 to the extent that we cannot view the conviction on count one as safe”.