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The narrowly-won appeal focused on a judge’s decision not to warn the jury the evidence could be unreliable due to the long delay between the alleged offending and trial.
The Supreme Court ordered a retrial on the “serious” allegations, but the charges were instead dismissed as the complainant does not wish to go to trial again.
A man who spent more than six years in prison after being convicted of raping a child has walked free from his sentence after the Supreme Court quashed his convictions in a split decision.
While the court ordered Gordon John Rippey to be retrialed on multiple child sex offence charges, the complainant told police she did not want to go through a trial again, meaning the matter has now been dismissed entirely.
Rippey was sentenced to 16 and a half years in prison in 2017 after being found guilty and convicted on multiple charges of offending against the complainant, who was aged 10-11 at the time of the alleged offences.
He took the matter to the Supreme Court last year, arguing his convictions should be quashed because the judge at his trial did not warn the jury the victim’s evidence could be unreliable.
Section 122 of the Evidence Act 2006 allows judges to warn juries the evidence could be unreliable if it has been more than 10 years since the offending happened.
What prompted the charges?
The complainant initially told her parents in 2001 that Rippey had indecently assaulted her. The parents alleged that when they confronted Rippey he denied the allegations until the complainant, upset, pressed him on the matter. They said he then admitted touching the girl, but later retracted his admission, saying he only admitted it to avoid upsetting the girl further.
Rippey’s evidence at trial was that none of this was true, and that when he arrived at the house, the girl greeted him and hugged him, saying she had been pressured into making false allegations against him. The complainant denied this and Rippey did not mention it in his police interview.
At the time, police felt there was insufficient evidence to obtain a conviction, and Rippey was not charged.
The complainant contacted police again 14 years later, in her mid-20s, after seeing a Facebook picture of Rippey holding a small child.
She told police of more serious allegations, including rape.
The matter was argued in the Supreme Court in Wellington last year. Photo / Mark Mitchell
She said she hadn’t told police of the more serious alleged offending at her first interview when she was 11, because she felt conflicted, cared for Rippey, and didn’t want to be the reason he and his children had to leave.
“The prosecution case at trial was that Mr R facilitated his offending through cynical and strategic grooming of the complainant over a period of months,” the Supreme Court decision said.
“This explained why, as a child, she was besotted with him and why, in turn, she chose to minimise his offending during the first interview.”
Meanwhile the defence case at trial focused on the complainant’s admission she had earlier made a false accusation of inappropriate sexualised behaviour against her uncle, the inconsistencies between her two police statements, and that there was no opportunity for the offending to have happened.
Why did the appeal succeed?
The Supreme Court found the trial judge should have warned the jury about unreliability of evidence, given there was a “very lengthy delay” of 16 years between the alleged offending and the trial.
“The trial judge’s task is to objectively identify indicators of potential unreliability and to direct the jury on them unless there is a good reason not to. That the judge finds the complainant’s evidence credible is not a good reason.”
The delay also meant that Rippey’s son, who could have corroborated or contradicted the complainant’s evidence, was not interviewed in a timely way, meaning he could not remember anything material.
“The fact is, we cannot know what the son saw or heard in 2001. All we know is that, due to long delay, the jury lost the opportunity to find out.”
The court found the failure to give a reliability warning caused a miscarriage of justice.
Two of the five judges on the Supreme Court panel disagreed with the decision, finding there was no need for a warning and no miscarriage of justice had occurred.
What happens now?
The Supreme Court ordered a retrial, but Hamilton District Court Judge Arthur Tompkins said the complainant no longer wished to pursue the matter through the court system.
“She has spent the last nine years dealing with this matter,” he said in his decision, released last month.
The charges were fully dismissed and Rippey will face no further court action over these allegations.
Melissa Nightingale is a Wellington-based reporter who covers crime, justice and news in the capital. She joined the Herald in 2016 and has worked as a journalist for 10 years.
