Over two years, barristers tiptoed around an elephant in the courtroom – the shocking rape of a woman in the United States by Constance Marten’s partner when he was a child.
Marten, 38, and Mark Gordon, 51, were never accused of deliberately harming their baby Victoria, meaning the fact that he had spent 22 years in prison for a violent sexual crime when he was 14 was initially deemed inadmissible in their manslaughter trial.
