A Dunedin man who was jailed for 18 years for sexually abusing his two stepdaughters has failed on appeal after claiming a ``miscarriage of justice''.
The defendant, whose name is suppressed, was found guilty on 14 charges, spanning nine years, against the two girls, following a trial at the Dunedin District Court in March last year.
He was sentenced to 18 years imprisonment with a minimum non-parole period of a decade.
The man took his case to the Court of Appeal in November last year where he claimed his trial counsel, David More, did not follow his instructions and failed to properly outline the defence case in his closing address to the jury.
However, the court ruled there was no reason to quash the convictions.
The victims were aged 3 and 6 when the defendant began a relationship with their mother.
He moved in to their home in 2010 and much of his depraved offending took place when the woman was at work during the weekends.
The court heard at trial how he would call one of the victims into the bedroom on those mornings when he was alone, and ask them for a hug.
That would inevitably lead to forced sex acts and eventually rape.
The older of the two girls told police in a video interview her stepfather had raped her at least 50 times.
In 2014, the man's relationship with the girls' mother disintegrated and he moved to a Mosgiel flat.
However, the victims were still forced to visit him.
In January 2015, one of the victims told her mother that she did not want to go to stay with the defendant because he touched her.
The woman asked her other daughter if that had happened to her, and she confirmed it had.
Despite the disclosures, she did not believe her daughters and they continued to stay with her ex-partner.
The police became involved only when in June 2015, the younger girl told a school friend, who immediately sought help.
The defendant argued at appeal that Mr More did not cross-examine the victims according to his instructions.
But the court noted the man had raised no objections regarding his lawyer's tactics during the trial.
``The cross-examination that was undertaken put fairly to the complainants that [the defendant] denied all of the offending. It was put to them that they had made up the allegations,'' Justice Patricia Courtney said.
While one minor criticism of Mr More's closing address was accepted by the court, there was no miscarriage of justice.
