A man accused of sexually assaulting and pressuring a 15-year-old schoolgirl he met online into taking nude photographs of herself for him has been acquitted on five charges.
The jury hearing the trial of the 25-year-old man took just under two hours to reach its findings in the Dunedin DistrictCourt yesterday.
Judge John Macdonald discharged the man, who was found not guilty on two charges of indecently assaulting a girl under 16, having sexual connection with her, meeting the girl to commit a sexual offence after sexually grooming her and procuring her to make indecent publications, namely photographs of herself posing naked.
The man was remanded, with continued name suppression, for sentence on a sixth charge he admitted before trial, of unlawfully possessing indecent publications, the nude photographs of the girl.
The charges all arose from allegations by the girl about the man's sexual behaviour towards her at various times between July 17 and August 13 last year. The procuring charge related to his alleged behaviour sometime between January 1 and July 26, 2010.
Before sending the jurors out to deliberate, Judge Macdonald reminded them that Crown counsel Richard Smith and defence counsel Louise Garthwaite both agreed the credibility of the girl was "critical to the outcome of the trial''.
The Crown accepted there were inconsistencies in the girl's evidence but said that did not mean she was not telling the truth, while defence counsel contended the girl's evidence was unreliable and untrue.
Judge Macdonald also said the jurors were not to decide the charges on the basis of sympathy or prejudice. They might not approve of some of the things the girl did and might feel sorry for the accused for the predicament he was in, but that was not the way to reach their decision.
The judge reminded the jurors it was the Crown's job to prove the charges so they had to treat the accused as innocent until they found otherwise.
