ONE of two men jailed for sexually violating and indecently assaulting a married woman at the Korean Wharf in 2017 has had his leave to appeal against conviction refused by the Supreme Court.
The facts are that on the evening of June, 2017, the victim and her husband, who had recently moved to Taveuni to start a business, were relaxing at a beach when they were approached by the accused and their girlfriends, who joined them and shared alcohol and cigarettes.
Around midnight, they all went into town and bought a bottle of rum and then spent another hour or so at a drinking spot before their girlfriends were delivered home and then travelled to Korean Wharf together.
Around 4am, the victim, who had fallen fast asleep, was woken by the two men taking turns raping her. She recognised the accused persons by their body odour and voice.
She felt confused and very frightened as she couldn’t hear any sound from her husband and did not know where he was. She was afraid that something had happened to him.
When her husband arrived, he looked disoriented and was completely unaware of what had happened, and wanted to go home, so the two men got into the back seat of the vehicle.
The victim in the front pretended she was still asleep but whispered to her husband to “get them out of the car”. However, she wasn’t sure that he heard her.
When the men got out of the car, she told her husband that she had been raped and noticed her husband had a bruise or mark on the top of his head, which looked like evidence of an assault.
They went straight to their home base and immediately alerted their family members to what had happened. They then went to the police to report the matter and from there went to the Taveuni District Hospital.
Following the trial, both men were sentenced to 14 years imprisonment for rape, with a concurrent sentence of seven years imprisonment for the sexual assault.
Justices Brian Keith, Terence Arnold, and Lowell Goddard concluded that, given the strength of the evidence at trial, including the medical evidence and the series of swift complaints that followed the event, the absence of a recent complaint direction cannot have rendered the assessors’ opinion or the Judge’s verdicts unsafe.
“As the Court of Appeal concluded, there has been no substantial miscarriage of justice in relation to this ground of appeal either,” the judges ruled on October 30.
