Shamed Scottish Judges

- Exposed for unfair application of rape shield laws

Across the world, feminist legal academics are bullying politicians and legislators into adopting new measures aimed at increasing rape convictions. The result, year after year, is justice systems increasingly tilted to favour accusers, undermining the right to a fair trial for men, and increasing the likelihood that innocent men will be convicted.

Scotland judges were doing well in this macabre race to the bottom, but now they have suffered a setback. A UK Supreme Court has warned that Scottish courts are violating a defendant’s right to a fair trial. Scottish lawyers are claiming this could mean hundreds of men in prison will be lining up for appeals or possible compensation for false imprisonment.

It isn’t so much the laws which have been at fault but the way Scottish judges are choosing to interpret them – namely by denying juries critical evidence that might have been used to exonerate the accused men.

They have taken rape shield laws, designed to protect the accuser from humiliating questions about their sexual history or character, and used these to exclude evidence critical to an understanding of what actually happened between the two people.

A leading Scottish barrister, Thomas Ross KC, has been outspoken about what is going on there. He’s in a unique position to expose this injustice because, after handling over 100 rape cases, in 2022 he threw in the towel because he felt it was no longer possible to properly defend accused men. “I was just banging my head against a brick wall and getting nowhere.” Ross decided he’d be better off walking away from this territory so he could speak publicly about what is going on.

He’s now out there, describing in podcasts and interviews the ludicrous situation where defence lawyers have to submit all evidence they propose to use in court for approval prior to the trial. This includes all the questions they plan to ask, which is very useful, of course, for the complainant who has ample opportunity to adjust their own evidence to get their stories right.

Increasingly, questions the defence lawyers want to ask or evidence they wish to lead, are rejected by the court. Put simply, men simply aren’t allowed to provide juries with relevant evidence critical to their defence.

Ross mentions a conversation with a father whose 18-year-old son was facing a rape trial. “The dad was looking at me as if to say, ‘What kind of lawyer are you? This is my boy; he’s going to jail. He’s going in the sex offenders register. He is never going to get a job. I want this evidence laid out and you’re telling me you’re not going to be allowed to read it. That’s on you. This is your fault. If you’re the kind of lawyer that cannot get this evidence in, then you are clearly not up to it.”

“I just couldn’t do it anymore,” said Ross. Many other lawyers agree with Ross that the situation has become intolerable, which is why the Law Society of Scotland sought leave to intervene in the UK Supreme Court case arguing men aren’t getting the fair trials required by Article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights. And now, the UK Supreme Court, led by the most senior judge in the country, has agreed there is something very wrong in the way these trials have been conducted.

For other reasons, the UK judges unfortunately still sent to prison the two men who were the subjects of the appeal. One of these was Andrew Keir, who was sentenced to five years in prison for raping a drunk and sleeping woman at his home. But evidence withheld from the jury included CCTV footage showing an earlier drinking session at the pub where the woman, a work colleague of Keir, kissed him, and beckoned him into a disabled toilet. When they emerged, the couple were thrown out of the pub as it was assumed they had been having sex. Yet the CCTV footage was cut by the prosecutors to exclude all evidence of this earlier sexual contact.

There was a text message from Keir saying, “We went back and continued to have sex that we’d obviously had previously.” This was doctored to read “We… have sex,” as if it referred only to the alleged rape at Keir’s house.

So here we have a justice system falsifying statements, doctoring CCTV footage and tampering with the evidence, rewriting the history of what happened that evening to suit the complainant’s story.

“It’s not justice. It’s shameful that it took five Justices in London to tell our judges how to do their job,” says Ross.

Scottish academic Stuart Waiton, writing about this in The Spectator, describes the case as one of the most egregious examples of miscarriage of justice he has ever seen.

The other case dealt with by the UK Supreme Court involved David Daly, a man found guilty of historic child abuse. Excluded from the evidence presented to the jury was the fact that the complainant told police that the rape led to her getting pregnant and having a child – a claim which was found to be untrue. The defence was not allowed to question her about this fake pregnancy because it was not deemed relevant to the rape case. So, a bald lie used by an accuser to bolster her case is not relevant?

Early last year I wrote about Marc Catelli, a Sydney gelato salesman who was accused of sexual assault by a woman who had made similar accusations about two other men in the previous two years. He was facing a jury trial where the defence team was prohibited from mentioning these false allegations under NSW rape shield laws. Luckily Catelli’s case was dropped – but only because the complainant failed to show up for various hearings.

NSW is the only Australian state/territory which prohibits evidence of previous false allegations. The state seems determined to remain a prime mover when it comes to ever more draconian rape laws. In 2022 NSW led recent moves to introduce affirmative or enthusiastic consent laws, which are proving very successful at having more men sent to prison.

Two weeks ago a man’s post appeared on Reddit, warning men in Australia to learn from his mistakes. Here was a man who had just been released after serving a 2.9-year prison sentence for having sex without affirmative consent. His “victim” was a 43-year-old female he’d met on Tinder – he was 47 at the time. He invited her to his house, asking her on the phone to come over for sex “without strings.”

“The one-night stand was nothing out of the ordinary. Lots of kissing, touching, normal sex. I grew up in an era of “No Means No”. My victim never said “No” nor did she push me off,” he wrote, explaining he assumed “everything was good,” from the woman’s positive reaction at the time.

But he’s since learnt that wasn’t good enough – he needed to check he had “positive and enthusiastic consent”. That became very clear the next day, when a squad of six police officers came to his flat, unannounced: “busted down the door with a battering ram that cost me $5,000 to repair, and took evidence – sheets, condoms, clothes, etc.”

“I was on remand in jail for close to a year, negotiating with the Department of Public Prosecutions and waiting for my trial, in horrible, smelly old jails full of roaches and scummy people. No fun at all.”

At his trial he was lucky to escape with a sentence of only 2.9 years non-parole, 4.5 years in total.

His advice to other men – record everything and constantly check your partner is ok with everything you do. (Secret recording is not illegal unless it is played to a third party and can even legally be used in court to disprove evidence given against you.)

Since discovering the Reddit post I tracked down the shattered man – now facing the prospect that he will never again get a job in the banking industry which previously employed him. But putting his ordeal in perspective was the fact that while he was in prison his five-year-old son (from a previous relationship) was with his grandfather on the day of the Bondi Massacre. His brave grandfather used his body to successfully shelter the boy from the bullets.

Meanwhile, the feminist quest to destroy the lives of men continues unabated. Many other Australian states have now joined NSW in legislating affirmative consent – Victoria, Queensland and the ACT (Tasmania has similar laws dating back to 2004).

The ACT is going great guns. A recent report in The Canberra Times claimed there were at least 20 times as many sexual offence charges laid in the last quarter of 2024 compared to five years earlier – and that their new affirmative consent laws were contributing to this success. A few days later came the embarrassing retraction. The Justice and Community Safety Directorate had erred– new statistics showed only 3.5 times more charges in 2023 than 2020. Who knows what’s really going on here, but local ACT lawyers report that the current policy is that ALL sexual assault cases are shoved through to trial. No investigation is needed. Let the court decide.

And no one gives a hoot about the impact on accused men. Look what happened in NSW when the DPP Sally Dowling called an audit of sexual assault cases after seven District Court judges had criticised meritless cases being pushed through to court. The result was a whitewash, finding 97% of cases complied with the guidelines, and only 17 cases being discontinued.

Meanwhile, our jails are full of accused men who haven’t even had a trial. Two years ago I reported that 42% of the men in prison in NSW are on remand – they haven’t faced trial. Most of these are sexual assault or domestic violence cases.

But, at least in Australia, rape shield requirements have not yet reached the absurdities exposed in Scotland. Although evidence or questions about a complainant’s sexual history/behaviour may be excluded, we don’t have the mandatory pre-approval processes seen in Scotland.

Not yet. Note that the recent Australian Law Reform Commission Inquiry looking at judicial responses to sexual violence – which released its recommendations a year ago - proposed “ground rules” hearings pre-trial which would set us on a similar path to what is happening in Scotland.

And in Canada. The crippling effects of Canadian pre-trial hearings is a regular topic on the excellent YouTube video series, Not on Record – which features criminal lawyer Joseph Neuberger and legal researcher Diana Davison, long known for her work supporting wrongfully accused men. Davison explains that Canadian defence lawyers are not allowed to talk about anything of a sexual nature unless it is approved in a pretrial motion, nor can they discuss consensual sex that proceeded or followed the alleged rape. The fact the complainant gets to see all the defence evidence and questions in advance means her evidence can be tailored and sanitized.

Neuberger recently won a recent case involving a 19-year-old student who was accused of sexual assault and violence against another student. In dismissing all charges, the judge noted that the girl had tailored her evidence after learning how the defence team planned to shoot down her claims. The judge ended up apologising to the accused: “On behalf of the administration of justice for the Province of Ontario, I wish to apologize for the significant inconvenience and expense to which you have been subjected, as a result of these proceedings”.

Across the world, wrongfully accused men deserve similar apologies. Of course, if the police and prosecution did their jobs fairly in the first place, such cases would never reach court. But the misandrist culture we are in makes this increasingly unlikely. Our police and prosecutors are clearly cowed by the feminist-dominated media, academia and politicians.

It makes it all the more important to spread the word about this momentous UK Supreme Court case – which has exposed the injustice now so widespread.