Sex beast fails in appeal bid

10:15am Friday 5th September 2008

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A MAN jailed for carrying out a campaign of sex attacks on underage girls in Leigh has failed to convince Appeal Court judges he was wrongly convicted.

Stanley James Hill, 47, raped one girl and committed numerous sexual assaults against two others, London’s Criminal Appeal Court heard.

Hill, of Kensington Drive, Leigh, was jailed for three years at Liverpool Crown Court on May 25 last year after being convicted of rape, nine counts of indecent assault and one of indecency.

That sentence was ordered to run alongside a life sentence already imposed after he was convicted of attempted murder and two offences of witness intimidation in a separate trial at Liverpool Crown Court in March 2007.

Lord Justice Laws, sitting with Sir Charles Gray and Mr Justice Jack at London’s Criminal Appeal Court, heard Hill’s attempt to have his convictions for the sex offences overturned.

The jury trying him for the sex offences heard that two of his victims had tried to kill themselves, one leaping from a bridge a week before the trial.

The judge at Liverpool Crown Court had described the attempted murder a few days after Christmas 2005 as ‘a planned, premeditated attack with a knife at night in a public street on a woman against whom you had a grudge.’ Hill’s lawyers argued that the way in which one witness in the sex trial was cross-examined in front of the jury may have had a prejudicial effect on their view of Hill and compromised the fairness of the trial.

They argued that the jury should have been discharged by the judge and the trial aborted.

But Sir Charles Gray ruled: “The learned judge properly investigated the possible prejudicial effect of the cross-examination of the witness on the jury.

“This application (for permission to appeal) is accordingly refused.”