Rolf Harris: Judges overturn one of the entertainer's 12 indecent assault convictions
87-year-old was jailed for more than five years, after being convicted of assaults which took place between 1968 and 1986
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Rolf Harris has had one of 12 indecent assault convictions overturned by the Court of Appeal, as three judges ruled the conviction was “unsafe”.
But Lord Justice Treacy, Mrs Justice McGowan and the Recorder of Preston, Judge Mark Brown, rejected his applications to challenge the 11 other indecent assault convictions.
The artist and musician was convicted of 12 indecent assaults at London’s Southwark Crown Court in June 2014, one on an eight-year-old autograph hunter, two on girls in their early teens, and a catalogue of abuse against his daughter’s friend over 16 years.
Harris was jailed for five years and nine months, after being convicted of assaults which took place between 1968 and 1986. The Australian-born television presenter has since been released from that sentence.
The prosecution did not seek a retrial on the one count, and the judges agreed that a further trial would not be in the public interest. Harris was not in court for the ruling by the appeal judges.
The quashed conviction related to an allegation that Harris indecently assaulted an eight-year-old girl in 1969, when she attended an event at a leisure centre in Portsmouth.
But the judges refused Harris permission to appeal against the rest of the 2014 convictions.
They ruled that “stepping back and looking at the totality of the evidence” on those remaining counts: “We find nothing that causes us to doubt the safety of those convictions.”
Stephen Vullo QC, representing Harris, had presented four grounds of appeal at a recent hearing, which Harris attended.
The quashing centred on new evidence about the credibility of a prosecution witness, David James, who was the only person apart from the complainant herself to give evidence about Harris attending the leisure centre at the relevant time.
Lord Justice Treacy said the late Mr James was an “important witness” on count one at the trial, and if material now known about him had been “obtained and disclosed at the correct time it is very doubtful that Mr James would have been called as a witness”.
He added: “If he had been called to give evidence, his credibility would have suffered devastating damage.”
Lord Justice Treacy said if Mr James was “removed from the picture”, the complainant “is left on her own in asserting an encounter with Mr Harris at the community centre in circumstances where there was a body of evidence to the contrary”.
The court’s view was that the evidence about Mr James “operates to weaken the Crown’s case on the important issue of whether Rolf Harris ever attended the community centre in 1969 to the extent that we cannot view the conviction on count one as safe”.
In May this year, Harris was formally cleared of unconnected historical sex offences, which he had denied. He was formally found not guilty of four charges of indecent assault against girls as young as 13, after a retrial ended with a hung jury.