Teen rapist fails in bid to reduce sentence

9:13am Sunday 20th July 2008

A 16-year-old put on the sex offenders' register for life after drunkenly raping another teenager in Mortlake has failed to persuade top judges he was punished too harshly.

The boy, from Camden, who cannot be named for legal reasons, raped the 17-year-old girl in April last year.

Despite claiming the sex had been consensual, the boy was sentenced to four years in a young offenders' institution, plus three years extended licence, after being convicted of rape at Kingston Crown Court on October 23 last year.

On Tuesday his barrister Katherine Kelleher asked Lord Justice Toulson, sitting with Mr Justice Rafferty and Judge Michael Mettyear, at London's Criminal Appeal Court, to cut the boy's sentence so his life need not be blighted by the stigma of being on the register.

Miss Kelleher argued the boy should have been given a sentence of two-and-a-half years or less as by law any sentence longer than that for a sex offence carried with it life on the sex offenders' register.

She said the burden was too much for a 16-year-old in the circumstances of this particular rape and said evidence of his previous convictions should not have been put before the jury, as they were not for sex offences.

But Lord Justice Toulson refused both applications to appeal against the sentence and conviction.

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