Our client is a 19-year old man from south-western Sydney.
Shortly after his 18th birthday, he was invited to participate in a police interview.
He voluntarily attended the police station and took part in the interview without seeking legal advice.
This is always unadvisable as participating in an interview can result in seemingly innocuous but legally adverse information being divulged, regardless of whether the person was in fact involved in the suspected offending conduct.
His interview resulted in bolstering the prosecution case, as he made a number of admissions consistent with the statement made by the complainant.
He was subsequently charged with one count of sexual intercourse without consent, which is also known as sexual assault.
The case was then referred to the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, or DPP, who saw fit to press a second sexual assault charge.
The case was eventually listed for a trial in the District Court of New South Wales, and upon being instructed to act, our defence team pressed for several potentially incriminating parts of our client’s police interview to be excluded from the evidence to be presented at trial, on the basis it would be unfairly prejudicial in the circumstances to include it.
A number of important concessions were agreed, which put our client in a far more favourable situation that if those parts of the interview had been pressed and ultimately admitted as evidence before the jury.
The complainant gave evidence (testified) during the trial and her evidence was consistent with her statements to the police.
However, our defence team’s preparations elicited information which undermined material parts of those statements, which greatly assisted in undermining her credibility during cross examination.
Our investigations also revealed that a witness to whom the complainant described the alleged events had deleted messages that did not assist her friend.
We recovered those messages, unassisted by the police or DPP. The witness, who denied deleting messages, was confronted with this material and had to admit to the conduct, which could potentially amount to an attempt to pervert the course of justice.
The prosecution then applied to have the witness declared ‘adverse’ (previously known as a ‘hostile witness’) which would have enabled the prosecution to cross examination the witness.
The jury was sent out while this application was made. We strongly opposed the application and it was refused.
Our client chose to exercise his right to silence and did not testify at trial.
In the result, the jury took just 3 hours to return a unanimous verdict of not guilty.