SUPREME COURT Man Acquitted Of Rape Charge

Press, Issue 31095, 25 June 1966, Page 20

SUPREME COURT Man Acquitted Of Rape Charge

After a retirement of almost four hours, a jury in the Supreme Court yesterday acquitted John Moore Kelly, a 22-year-old naval rating, on a charge of the rape of a 15-year-old girl at the Pleasant Point Domain on April 27.

Mr Justice Macarthur ordered that Kelly, who had pleaded not guilty, be discharged.

The jury, which consisted of eight men and four women, gave its verdict at 4.30 p.m. after returning to the Court an hour and a half earlier to hear part of the evidence read in relation to Kelly’s first questioning by the police, he having claimed he thought he would be charged with unlawful sexual intercourse. Mr M. G. L. Loughnan, on behalf of the accused, had suggested to the jury that the girl’s story of intercourse without consent was “just not credible.”

There were too many factors inconsistent with rape, said Mr Loughnan. No complaint had been heard from the girl for a week. There were no injuries on the girl’s body, and no torn clothing, nor any marks from the girl on the accused. There was no adequate evidence that the girl had resisted the accused at all.

The girl’s whole demeanour after intercourse in the domain was quite inconsistent with rape, submitted Mr Loughnan. One would have expected more than a few tears from her—and she had accompanied Kelly in his car back from the domain to her grandmother’s home in Aranui where, although questioned by her grandmother, she had said nothing. “Can you understand a girl who has been ravished not

complaining for eight days?” Mr Loughnan asked. Mr C. M. Roper, in his address for the Crown, said that the sole question in the case was whether the girl complainant, only just 15 at the time, had consented to intercourse or not.

“Are we to believe that on a seven-minute drive from Cathedral square to Breezes road, with a 22-year-old man whom she had not seen since she was 13, this girl consented to going to the domain for intercourse with him, at 9 o’clock in the morning, when she is supposed to be going to her grandmother’s place?” asked Mr Roper. “I suggest that that interpretation takes some swallowing,” Mr Roper said. The key to the matter, suggested Mr Roper, was in the accused’s own evidence, when he had hedged over the subject of the girl telling her parents. But if she had been a willing party, why would she want to tell anyone? “Surely it could only be that the accused had done something to which she objected?" Mr Roper said. His Honour, summing up on the matter of corroboration of the girl’s story, said that if the jury rejected the accused’s explanation for his initial denial of intercourse, it could treat such denial as corroboration that the intercourse had been without her consent.

Mr Loughnan, at the end of the summing-up, submitted that the jury might be instructed that this was one of the weaker forms of corroboration.

His Honour: I do not consider it necessary for me to give any further direction on the question of corroboration.