Court rejects appeal by sex-abuse couple

A NSW couple who claim they were wrongly jailed over their daughter’s ‘repressed memories’ of violent sexual abuse have lost their appeal.

The husband and wife were convicted in 2016 on 86 counts of sexually abusing their youngest daughter.

A NSW couple who claim they were wrongly jailed over their daughter’s “repressed memories” of violent sexual abuse have lost their appeal against their convictions, but a dissenting judge has described the daughter’s allegations as highly improbable.

In a split decision, the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal denied the couple a retrial and declined to reduce the father’s 48-year jail term, the longest in NSW history for child sexual abuse.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Des Fagan said the jury should have considered the possibility that the daughter’s improbable allegations of torture and violent abuse extending for 14 years could be the product of “psychiatric exaggeration”.

The husband and wife, who cannot be named, were convicted in 2016 on 86 counts of sexually abusing their youngest daughter, who told police she was treated as a sex slave from the age of five to 19 and assaulted almost daily.

The couple’s middle daughter and son — along with many of their friends — have stood by them and say they saw no evidence of the abuse.

In their majority decision refusing an appeal, Chief Justice Tom Bathurst and Justice Elizabeth Fullerton cited corroborative evidence from another daughter, who testified her father had molested her while giving her sports massages. Diary entries by the daughters and testimony from their grandmother also corroborated some of the allegations.

The justices noted that the couple’s lawyers had not raised the repressed memory issue at trial, and they therefore rejected it as a ground for their appeal.

Justice Fagan noted that the daughter had made no allegations of extreme abuse until two years after beginning psychiatric care. He said there was a “manifest improbability” to her claim she endured this abuse for more than a decade without telling anyone because she thought her parents’ behaviour was normal.

He said it was a reasonable hypothesis that her father was committing sexual assaults of a less serious nature and the disorder of her mind caused her to grossly exaggerate what had occurred.

The appeal decision comes at a time when a growing number of criminal lawyers are expressing concern about miscarriages of justice in sexual assault cases.

Appeals judges in NSW overturned five sexual assault cases in the latter half of last year because of significant doubts about the credibility of the allegations and the logic of the jury’s reasoning.

NSW authorities are also facing a number of lawsuits over claims of wrongful prosecution.