Sc v R

The Court of Criminal Appeal held that seven convictions for sexual offences against two cognitively impaired complainants were unreasonable and could not be supported by the evidence, quashing the verdicts and entering acquittals. The Court conducted its own independent assessment of the evidence as required by Dansie and found that the primary complainant's JIRT interview evidence was pervasively unreliable due to the fragmentary, contradictory and largely led nature of her answers, the real risk of contamination or coaching by the complainants' mother (SP), the second complainant's exculpatory evidence, and the trial judge's failure to apply the Markuleski direction by considering how acquittals on four counts — driven by concerns about SP's contamination of the evidence — bore upon the remaining seven counts which relied on the same body of evidence. The Court also held that the trial judge's advantage in seeing and hearing the witnesses did not resolve the doubt, as the concerns arose from the content of the evidence rather than demeanour, and that the applicant had not breached the rule in Browne v Dunn by not expressly putting to SP that she coached the complainants, where the cross-examination clearly signalled that imputation.