Rape victim backs calls from Scotland’s top prosecutor to overturn historic legal ruling

dailyrecord.co.uk:

A rape victim whose attacker had his conviction quashed has backed a call by Scotland’s top prosecutor to overturn a historic legal rule.The woman saw Sean Hogg convicted of raping her when she was just 13 but his conviction was later quashed on appeal due to an “insufficiency of evidence”.Last week, Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain KC asked a nine-judge bench at the Court of Session in Edinburgh to overturn a legal rule that would see an end to needing two independent sources of evidence to prove a crime has been committed.In Hogg’s case, the judge Lord Lake mistakenly gave directions to jurors that the “distress” of the victim, seen by a witness relating to a second alleged attack by the accused, could offer key corroboration required.But under current legal rules, Hogg would have been acquitted once the jury couldn’t apply mutual corroboration and was acquitted on the other charges as there was no sufficiency of evidence for a conviction on any remaining charge.Now, the woman, who cannot be identified, has called for the legal rule of corroboration to be scrapped to give more rape victims justice.The woman, now 19, said: “Rape victims carry a sentence for life and we cannot have attackers walk free because of an out of date rule.“We need a legal system where victims can see attackers brought to justice on the strength of a single rape victim, standing up and telling a jury the truth.”Hogg’s case is understood to be one of two sexual offences trials from last year that resulted in majority not proven verdicts, which prompted Bain to call for a change in the law.The rule the Lord Advocate is asking to be overturned dates back to the trial of Henry Morton for indecent assault in 1937, and means statements made by alleged