Wayne Trevor Mitchell sex conviction quashed after girl ‘made up claims’

A Queensland man who maintained his innocence has had his conviction for molesting a 10-year-old girl quashed on appeal. WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT

Wayne Trevor Mitchell leaving Maroochydore Courthouse on April 16, 2024

*WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT*

A Queensland man who maintained his innocence throughout has had his conviction for molesting a 10-year-old girl after a party quashed on appeal to the state’s highest court.

In a decision handed down by the Court of Appeal in Brisbane on Friday, Justices David Boddice, Peter Flanagan and Susan Brown stated that a District Court jury’s guilty verdicts for Wayne Trevor Mitchell should be set aside.

On November 6 last year, the jury sitting at Maroochydore on the Sunshine Coast found Mr Mitchell guilty of three counts of indecent treatment of a child.

The jury found him not guilty of one count of rape.

The first count related to Mr Mitchell allegedly inserting his fingers into the girl’s vagina, the second count to kissing her on her lips and the third of having unzipped the complainant’s swimmers

The appeal court ordered that verdicts of acquittal should be entered for each of the three counts.

Wayne Trevor Mitchell leaving Maroochydore Courthouse.

Justice Boddice wrote that the verdicts of the jury were unreasonable due to discrepancies in the child’s evidence, and her admission of having falsely recounted detailed sex acts with Mr Mitchell in a web-chat on Discord with her friends from school.

“The Discord chat, meant the jury ought to have had a doubt as to the complainant’s reliability, in respect of each count,” Justice Boddice wrote in reasons agreed to by all three justices.

The young girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, accepted in evidence that she had given a detailed but false account of sexual activity between her and Mr Mitchell to her friends.

Her Discord chat stated that Mr Mitchell forced her to perform oral sex and that Mr Mitchell ejaculated inside her, the decision states.

She testified at trial that she had “made up” details in the Discord chat including that Mr Mitchell “came inside of me”, and that Mr Mitchell kept telling her he wanted to make her moan and to hear her suffer.

She testified at trial that even though she wrote to her friends in the chat that “he would’ve killed me” if she did not comply, Mr Mitchell had not told her he would kill her if she did not let him do whatever he wanted.

“The falsity of those detailed accounts was maintained by the complainant to her mother and her friends, because the complainant was concerned that her mother would be angry with her and because of concern as to the reaction of her friends to having made such untruthful statements,” Justice Boddice wrote in reasons agreed to by all three judges.

The court found much of the alleged victim’s statements were false.

Mr Mitchell elected neither to give nor call evidence at the trial in Maroochydore last year but his lawyers submitted that he did not commit any of the sex acts alleged.

The girl did not make a complaint to police until three years after the alleged offence date.

Her complaint was made to police after her mother read the contents of a chat on Discord on the girl’s phone when she confiscated it.

The girl’s father testified at trial that his daughter had slept in the same bed as Mr Mitchell on the night in question.

He told the jury that he asked her on the morning after the alleged sexual assaults whether “anything had happened” with Mr Mitchell and she indicated nothing had happened.

At trial the girl testified she had told her mother that the things in the Discord chat were true.

She told the jury she knew her mother would be angry with her if she told her mother that she had posted a series of untruthful things in the Discord chat about someone doing sexual stuff to her.

In her Discord chat, the girl wrote: “OK – story time – I might get flashbacks and/or start crying from this but it’s a-o-k :)”

“He got close enough to my mouth and trying to tongue kiss me – and I was only 10 so when he said if I don’t let him do whatever he wanted to do he would’ve killed me – I had to let him touch me – lick me – kiss me whatever this sick man wanted – but he didn’t stop there – he made me do …,” she wrote.

“It was nightmarish – scary – horrible – and he wasn’t gentle … to hear my pretty little voice box moan for him. I was so f***ing scared of this man – he mentally damaged me,” she wrote.

“He thankfully didn’t impregnate me with a child as I didn’t have my first period yet at the time,” she wrote in the chat which was replicated in the Court of Appeal decision.

“I’ve been traumatised ever since – I decided to bottle it all up inside and let it blow over – but I’ve learnt that I need to start telling people – waiting for it to die over isn’t going to help me,” she wrote.