Where an eyewitness directly contradicts a complainant's account and the prosecution neither cross-examines the eyewitness under s 38 of the Evidence Act 2008 nor advances any basis for the jury to reject the eyewitness's evidence, a conviction based on the complainant's evidence will be unreasonable. The passage of time and forensic disadvantage cannot be used to discount contradictory evidence or to overcome deficiencies in the prosecution case — to do so would impermissibly invert the forensic disadvantage direction. Where convictions on some charges are found unreasonable, tendency evidence from those charges cannot properly support remaining convictions, and those convictions must also be set aside.
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