Alex John Hill has been discharged from prosecution and will not face a retrial.
A jury had found Mr Hill, who was 21 at the time, guilty of one charge of rape and one of grave and criminal assault, both committed in 2019. It had also found him not guilty of two other rape charges and three common assault charges against the same woman.
Mr Hill’s lawyer, Advocate Mark Boothman, argued to the Court of Appeal that that the rape conviction was unsafe because the woman’s evidence for the one count of rape on which Hill had been convicted at the end of the prosecution’s case was “tenuous and vague”.
During the trial, the Crown had argued that a series of SnapChat messages between Hill, the complainant and her family messages proved that Hill had raped the complainant on a number of occasions, but Advocate Boothman said before the Court of Appeal that, when taking the witness stand during the trial, she had only specifically referred to two occasions of non-consensual sex linked to specific dates.
Pictured: Advocate Mark Boothman represented Mr Hill.
However, he said, these two occasions had formed the basis of separate charges, for which the jury had found his client not guilty.
Another ground of appeal was that the Bailiff, who had presided over the trial, should have allowed the jury to consider the significance of consent and relevance of any loss of consciousness on the part of the complainant when it found Hill guilty of grave and criminal assault.
Hill had been convicted of this charge for placing his hands on the complainant’s throat on one occasion and choking her until she allegedly passed out.
Overturning the convictions, the Court of Appeal said: “The appeal against the conviction [of grave and criminal assault] is allowed because the defence of consent could on one interpretation of the evidence have been available to the Appellant [Mr Hill] and the learned Bailiff’s summing up did not assist the jury with directions that this be considered.”
Concerning the rape conviction, the Appeal judges concluded: “The question for the learned Bailiff was whether the [SnapChat] social media messages were sufficient of themselves to found a conviction of rape on occasions other than those covered by Counts 3 and 6 [the specific allegations of rape for which the jury had found Mr Hill not guilty].
“For the most part, the social media messages are not inconsistent with the Complainant’s own evidence that he only failed to withdraw from her on two occasions [the above not-guilty counts].”
Pictured: One of the Court of Appeal judges was former Bailiff Sir William Bailhache.
They continued: “While other messages are open to constructions which could support the prosecution on different occasions on Count 5 [the grave and criminal assault conviction], the principal issue here is not whether the social media messages can supplement a complaint which the Complainant was making, but whether the messages could create a complaint where the Complainant had failed to give evidence of events other than those for [the not-guilty rape counts].
“We have reached the conclusion that the learned Bailiff could not reasonably reach the conclusion he did that it was proper for a jury to convict on this material.
“We think that this is so on the strength of the material alone but our view of it is fortified by the fact that the Complainant admitted in her evidence that the messages which she had kept and shown to the police were only a selection of the messages which passed between her and [Mr Hill].
“She was, in effect, exchanging messages with him in order to generate material upon which she could justify her complaint, as indeed she admitted, and clearly for that purpose messages which did not assist her in that respect could not be deleted.”
James McNeill QC was presiding over the Court of Appeal, sitting with Lord Anderson of Ipswich and Sir William Bailhache.
Mr Hill had been due to be sentenced in March.
