Nguyen v R

The appeal before the court was brought by a person convicted of a charge of sexual intercourse with a complainant without her consent. The applicant had met the victim through social media and subsequently drove her to various locations before the incident occurred in a car in a carport at the applicant's apartment block. The applicant was found to have raped the victim. The applicant and the victim exchanged text messages in the days following the incident. The victim then spoke to her ex-boyfriend in Vietnam and subsequently approached the police. The applicant sought to appeal against his conviction on the basis that the verdict was unreasonable and could not be supported when considering the evidence. The applicant argued that the victim had sent messages to determine whether the person who raped her had any interest in her other than sexual, and that any doubt about the victim's credibility or reliability arising from these messages was a doubt that the jury's advantage in seeing and hearing her evidence was capable of resolving. The applicant also argued that observations of the trial judge in the absence of the jury about the strength of the Crown case were irrelevant to the ground of appeal. The court rejected the ground of appeal relating to the absence of evidence from the victim's ex-boyfriend, holding that this did not render the verdict unreasonable. The appeal was dismissed, and leave to appeal was granted.