The Victorian Court of Appeal has backed the jury’s verdict after closely examining the evidence and rejected a bid to overturn the conviction of a man found guilty of historical child sexual abuse.
The case centred on two incidents alleged to have occurred at a Gembrook property.
While the complainant also spoke about a third incident at another location, that allegation was not part of the charges before the jury.
A judge in an earlier trial had ruled there was no reliable evidence to support that third allegation and directed a not-guilty verdict on it.
The applicant argued the jury could not reasonably have found him guilty, pointing to what he described as inconsistencies in the complainant’s account, particularly regarding the timing, sequence, and location of the alleged incidents.
The complainant had given evidence recalling that she was nine years old at the time of the first two incidents, but other evidence suggested she would have been closer to ten or eleven.
She also described the third incident as occurring after the first two, yet records showed the event took place at a house the family had occupied years before moving to the Gembrook property.
The complainant further described a gap of “a few years” before reporting the matter to her grandmother, which the applicant argued conflicted with the prosecution’s timeline and cast doubt on her credibility.
The prosecution responded that these inconsistencies did not undermine the substance of the complainant’s allegations.
They emphasised that the complainant was only 14 when giving evidence and was recalling events from several years earlier, a situation in which minor errors in timing or sequence are common.
Her statements regarding her age, the spacing of incidents, and the timing of her complaints were often tentative, reflecting the difficulty of recalling events from childhood.
The prosecution also stated that the circumstances described by the complainant aligned with the reality of the Gembrook property, including details about sleeping arrangements and the opportunity for the offences to occur, supporting the credibility of her account.
The jury had also been carefully directed on the third incident, which had been found unreliable, and instructed to consider it only in assessing her credibility with respect to the offences charged.
In considering the appeal, the Court of Appeal stated that the jury has the primary responsibility for assessing witness credibility and weighing evidence.
The exact dates of the offences were not essential beyond establishing that the applicant had the opportunity to commit them at the Gembrook property.
Minor inconsistencies in the complainant’s testimony regarding her age, the sequence of events, and the timing of her complaints were not sufficient to create a reasonable doubt about the applicant’s guilt.
The court state the complainant’s evidence regarding the first and second incidents remained consistent and coherent, and the jury was entitled to accept her account of these events while discounting minor errors or the unreliable third incident.
The court concluded the jury had acted reasonably in convicting the applicant, and the inconsistencies raised did not undermine the core allegations.
The application for leave to appeal was therefore refused, declaring the principle that minor inconsistencies in a witness’s account, especially when recalling traumatic events from childhood, do not automatically negate the credibility of their testimony.
The decision demonstrates the careful balance courts and juries maintain in distinguishing between peripheral errors in memory and the substance of historical allegations, and confirms that juries are entitled to make these distinctions when evaluating evidence.
