Australia: Wedding video leads to quashing of rape conviction

A NSW man who was jailed for allegedly raping and molesting his stepdaughter has had his conviction quashed after the discovery of a wedding video taken years later showing the woman patting his chest and grabbing him playfully.

The man, who cannot be named, was sentenced to a maximum of four and a half years' jail in February last year over a series of alleged assaults on his stepdaughter in the mid-1970s.

This followed his stepdaughter going to police in September 2008 and claiming that, when she was a child, the man would come into her bedroom two to three times a week and touch her genitals.

On one occasion, the woman claimed, her stepfather had raped her in the main bedroom of the family's suburban home.

These alleged incidents had been interspersed with occasional physical assaults, including strikes to the head that left the young girl with partial hearing loss and too scared to report the abuse, it was claimed.

But the man claimed that the alleged assaults had never occurred and that his stepdaughter was motivated by a bitter dispute within the family over her grandmother's will.

At a hearing before three judges in the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal last month, lawyers for the man produced a video from a wedding in January 1995.

This was at a time when, according to the woman, she and her stepfather had been estranged for many years. The video shows the woman smiling at her alleged abuser and toasting him with a glass of champagne.

Soon after, during a group photo, the woman is shown rubbing or patting the upper part of his back.

Finally, during a photo with the man, the woman places her right arm over his shoulder and her hand on his chest, before grabbing the skin on his neck in "an affectionate manner".

The woman said she had been told by the photographer to put her arm on her stepfather and had felt "very uncomfortable".

"... you can even see me jokingly trying to strangle him and I had to smile because it was my sister's wedding day."

But the judges found the video images showed that at the time of the wedding the woman harboured "no ill will or resentment toward the appellant".

"To the contrary they depict spontaneous gestures by her towards him," they said in a judgment handed down on Monday. "They are capable of warranting an adverse assessment of her credibility and the reliability of her account ..."

The judges found that, had it been available at the trial, the video would likely have raised in the jury's mind a reasonable doubt about the man's guilt.

They quashed the man's conviction and ordered a retrial.

Original report here




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