Sex Crimes in the Fifties by Lisa Featherstone

Author:Lisa Featherstone
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522866568
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

CHAPTER 5

Medical doctors at trial

In 1950, 19-year-old Owen Turner pleaded not guilty to the rape of an 18-year-old woman on the beach at Forster in coastal NSW. Dr Allen Muscio, a Government Medical Officer (GMO) from Taree, presented medical testimony at Turner’s trial. Muscio first saw the complainant when she arrived at his surgery between two and three in the morning of the alleged assault. He described her as ‘dazed and frightened’. Her father had carried her into the surgery. On physical examination, Muscio found that she was still bleeding, and there were tears in the mucus membrane and the hymen. The damage was substantial, with Muscio reporting to the court that in his 40 years of practice he had never seen ‘so much injury after sexual intercourse’. There were no marks on the rest of her body, but the genital wounds were so significant that the complainant had to be kept in hospital for a week afterwards.

Muscio carefully explained the complainant’s wounds to the court and offered his opinion on their severity. His testimony was a seemingly decisive start to the Crown’s medical evidence. But under cross-examination the certainties of Muscio’s medical testimony rapidly began to unravel. The defence counsel, J.B. Kinkead, sought to persuade the jury that Turner had not committed rape. Kinkead questioned the doctor: why was there no sign of violence on her body outside the vagina? Kinkead suggested that forced sex, especially in the sand where the alleged offence had taken place, would have produced more injury to her body, both inside and out. Further, he claimed that the internal damage could have happened during consensual sex, as the defendant was large and strong. Finally, defence pressed the doctor to reveal whether the complainant had been a virgin before this act. Muscio explained that the clinical evidence could not confirm or deny her virginity. The doctor had to agree with the key medico-legal guide, Alfred Swaine Taylor’s Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence, that a virgin might suffer some injury the first time she had sex, whether the sex was consensual or not.1

The delivery and reception of medical evidence in this trial was problematic on a number of levels. The doctor clearly believed a sexual assault had taken place, and although he thoroughly detailed the damage to the complainant, Muscio could not provide the certainties required under cross-examination. Within the limits of medical evidence, he could not ‘prove’ definitively that a rape had occurred. Turner was found not guilty after the jury deliberated for 40 minutes.2

The Turner trial illustrates wider problems with medical authority in sexual assault trials in 1950s Australia. Medical testimony was omnipresent in trials for rape and child sexual assault, doctors being expected to give detailed, technical evidence of bruising, tears, scratches and other harm to complainants’ bodies. Yet defence counsel cross-examinations regularly undermined such evidence. Recent studies have shown that there is often no visible damage to the body of a victim of sexual assault, particularly in paediatric cases.3 There were

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.