A man who prompted an outcry about lenient sentencing for young offenders when he was given a non-custodial sentence after his conviction for raping a 13-year-old girl has had that conviction quashed.
Campaigners and politicians reacted with outrage in April after 22-year-old Sean Hogg was given a 270-hour community payback order by a judge, Lord Lake, who said that had he been older than 25 when he committed the offence he would have faced a four- or five-year custodial sentence.
The Scottish Sentencing Council’s guidelines on young people, which came into effect in January 2022, advise against custodial sentences for those under the age of 25, and recommend that judges take into account an offender’s intellectual and emotional maturity.
They have been challenged after a series of cases in which violent and sexual offenders were given lighter sentences on account of their age.
Hogg smiled as he left the court of criminal appeal in Edinburgh on Wednesday morning after the judge Lady Dorrian told him: “There was an insufficiency of evidence for a conviction and the inevitable result of the appeal must be acquittal.”
Hogg, of Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, was convicted by a jury in the high court in Glasgow in April of raping a 13-year-old girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, when he was 17.
In a statement released through her lawyer, Aamer Anwar, the girl said that while she appreciated that senior judges had reached their decision after very careful consideration, “that does not take away from the feeling of devastation and knowing that there is no hope of closure”.
Court papers set out allegations that Hogg had attacked the girl on various occasions between March and June 2018. As well as being ordered to carry out unpaid work, Hogg was put under supervision and placed on the sex offender register for three years.
He claimed he had been wrongfully convicted of the alleged attacks in Dalkeith Park, Midlothian, and appealed.
At an earlier hearing, Donald Findlay KC told the court that legal procedures used in Scotland to establish the guilt of a rapist had not been properly followed in his client’s case.
Findlay said Lord Lake had told jurors in his legal directions that the girl’s evidence could be corroborated by an account of a man who said she appeared to be “distressed” after the incident, but this was a misdirection, which resulted in Hogg’s wrongful conviction. Corroboration is a unique requirement of Scots law, by which each key fact must be supported by two independent sources of evidence.
The solicitor general for Scotland, Ruth Charteris KC, said the crown had decided not to seek a new prosecution. She accepted that the girl’s experience of the criminal justice system “has been very difficult” and offered to meet her and her family.
Sandy Brindley, the chief executive of Rape Crisis Scotland, told BBC Radio Scotland that it was clear the girl had been “completely failed” by the justice process.
“There’s a young woman at the heart of this who has reported rape, which is not easy to do, gone through the lengthy justice process only to see the conviction overturned on the basis of a judge’s misdirection.”
The Scottish government is planning significant justice reforms including the creation of a specialist sexual offences court and a pilot of judge-only trials for rape cases, but these face serious opposition from the legal profession.
