Two men jailed for gang raping three teenagers during a bucks party weekend will face a retrial and a third has been acquitted after winning appeals against their convictions.<\/p>\n
Maurice Hawell, 31, his younger brother Marius, 24, and Andrew David, 31, were all found guilty of sexually assaulting three women in 2024 after a joint trial lasting almost four weeks.<\/p>\n
All three men appealed against their convictions, arguing the trial judge had made a number of errors in her directions to the jury and the verdicts were unreasonable.<\/p>\n
The appeal was upheld by the court of criminal appeal on Monday, with the panel of judges quashing the convictions for all three.<\/p>\n
Sign up: AU Breaking News email<\/a><\/p>\n Justice Belinda Rigg ordered Maurice Hawell and David face a retrial in the New South Wales<\/a> district court.<\/p>\n The convictions against Marius Hawell were dismissed and verdicts of acquittal entered in their place.<\/p>\n Maurice Hawell had been jailed for 14 years, David for 13 years and Marius nine years.<\/p>\n During the appeal in August, the men\u2019s lawyers claimed the jury may have been led to misinterpret the trio\u2019s state of mind over the weekend of offending.<\/p>\n Tim Game SC said the evidence may have been misconstrued as a \u201cshared job\u201d or a \u201cjob for the lot\u201d when considered all together for each man, leading to an unreasonable verdict.<\/p>\n \u201cIt has a sinister element because it turns consensual sex into the threat of non-consensual sex and there\u2019s absolutely nothing to support that proposition,\u201d David\u2019s barrister said.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Breaking News Australia<\/p>\n Get the most important news as it breaks<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n David and Maurice Hawell will return to the NSW district court on 12 December.<\/p>\n Maurice\u2019s younger brother can be immediately released from prison.<\/p>\n Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse is available from the following organisations. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect<\/a> (1800 737 732). In the UK, Rape Crisis<\/a> offers support on 0808 500 2222. In the US, Rainn<\/a> offers support on 800-656-4673. Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org\/rcip\/internl.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two men jailed for gang raping three teenagers during a bucks party weekend will face a retrial and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":336208,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4,450,451,3,452,453],"class_list":{"0":"post-336207","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-headlines","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-top-stories","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=336207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336207\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/336208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}