Grace Millane’s killer appeals to NZ to quash murder conviction and life term
THE man found guilty of murdering British backpacker Grace Millane in New Zealand in 2018 has appealed against his conviction and life sentence.
The jury at the trial last November found that Ms Millane, 22, was strangled to death on her birthday by the 28-year-old man, whom she met on the online dating app Tinder. His identity has been kept secret by court order.
Prosecutors said Ms Millane, from Essex, was strangled for a prolonged period, while the defendant argued that her death was not murder but the result of rough sex that went wrong.
It was alleged in court that after Ms Millane was killed, the man took intimate photos of her, searched for pornography online and went on another Tinder date, before burying the body in West Auckland’s Waitākere Ranges.
At the Court of Appeal yesterday, the man’s lawyer, Rachael Reed QC, said the appeal did not seek to “condone or excuse” her client’s actions following Ms Millane’s death. But she argued that too much emphasis had been placed on those actions in determining his sentence, which mandated a minimum of 17 years in prison before he could be eligible for parole.
Ms Reed also said the conviction was flawed, arguing that the jury had not received proper directions on considering the issue of consent and that they did not have sufficient experience to assess expert evidence.
She said the jurors did not have guidance enabling them to fully weigh up the killer’s “honest belief in consent”.
Reiterating the defence claim that Ms Millane had consented to have pressure applied to her neck, she argued: “Consent shouldn’t be removed just because someone has died.”
But prosecutor Brian Dickey maintained the appeal was “flimsy” and that the question of consent had been fully examined in the original trial.
He also told the appeal judges that 90 seconds was a long time to apply pressure to someone’s neck.
“She must have been resisting … and struggling for her life,” Mr Dickey said. “You don’t just tap someone’s neck and they die.”
The trial of Ms Millane’s killer has re-energised debate in both New Zealand and Britain over the use of the socalled “rough sex defence”.
In July, Parliament voted to outlaw “consent for sexual gratification” as a defence for causing serious harm to another person, following an outcry in the UK over a series of acquittals on such grounds.
However, the jury in the New Zealand trial took just five hours to unanimously convict Ms Millane’s killer of murder.
The Court of Appeal judges reserved their decision in the case.