Not guilty verdict after Jury Trial for charges of Child Sexual Assault and Aggravated Indecent Assault

Our client is a 44-year-old IT professional from Fiji. He and his wife had two sons, aged 10 and 6 years old.

The couple were having marital difficulties which resulted in the wife making a complaint to Police and seeking an AVO.

Following this our client was arrested. While he was in Police custody, the wife changed the locks to the house.

She also withdrew a significant amount of money from their joint bank account.
A few weeks later, she made a further complaint to Police alleging that our client had sexually assaulted their 10-year-old son over a year ago.

The child was interviewed with Police and our client was charged. Our client came to us distressed.

We immediately began preparing for Trial.

We obtained letters and cards which the son had written to our client during and after the allegations which spoke highly of him and their relationship.

We also subpoenaed records with FACS which recorded information about the complaint.

Generally, there are restrictions on this due to the sexual assault communications privilege. However, we successfully applied to the Court for leave to access these documents.

The Trial proceeded at Parramatta District Court.

We cross-examined the wife at length about her conduct and suggested to her that she had concocted the complaint and coerced the child.

We also put tendered messages sent by the wife where she made clear that she wanted to ruin our client’s life.

We also cross-examined the child and were able to elicit that the mother had exerted significant pressure on him and had manipulated him to go along with her complaint.

It took the jury less than an hour to find our client ‘not guilty’ of all charges.

Our client was overjoyed with the result and has engaged us in Family Law proceedings.