Description
Appeal by stated case:- In this case the appellant was convicted of various charges of assault on summary complaint at Edinburgh Sheriff Court perpetrated against his former partners. The appellant appealed against his conviction on the grounds that there were sufficient circumstances of similarity between the evidence of the complainer on charges 1 and 2 and the evidence of complainers on other charges for the doctrine of mutual corroboration to be applied. It was contended on behalf of the appellant that the time gap between the latest date in charge 2, 31 December 1969, and the earliest date of the subsequent allegations, 1 January 1978, was too great to apply the doctrine between the two sets of charges. It was further contended that the locus of the alleged offences in charges 1 and 2 were so different from those in the other charges that the doctrine could not apply, in that the locus in charge 1 was a motor vehicle in a public street, in charge 2 was the complainer's parents' house when they were present, whereas the remaining charges occurred in private or in the presence of only very young children. Here in refusing the appeal the court observed that in determining whether it was permissible, as a matter of law, to find corroboration for the evidence of the first complainer in the evidence led in support of the remaining charges it was not appropriate to look at the evidence in a narrow and compartmentalised way but, rather, to consider whether the evidence was capable of indicating a course of conduct systematically pursued by the appellant. Here the court considered that the trial sheriff was entitled to hold that there was an underlying similarity in the criminal conduct, in the form of serial violence against successive domestic partners, that it was part of the same course of conduct systematically pursued by the appellant.
0141 553 4890
