Sentencing Day: The Downfall Of Jarryd Hayne

Former NRL player Jarryd Hayne is expected to be sentenced today. 

Hayne’s career kicked off in 2006 as a winger for the Parramatta Eels, winning the NRL’s Dally M Rookie of the Year award. 

The 35-year-old was found guilty of sexually assaulting a woman on the grand final night in 2018, following a third trial last month. 

Click the link below and listen the full story of Jarryd Hayne’s sentencing day

On today’s The Briefing episode, Sacha Barbour Gatt, the host of This Arvo in Sydney, takes us through the backstory of Jarryd Hayne, his massive fall from grace and why it’s taken so long to get this conviction. 

The first trial was in November of 2020. Hayne was interviewed and charged by New South Wales Police in November 2018 after the 26-year-old woman alleged he raped her at her house in Newcastle seven weeks earlier. 

Due to a hung jury in the first trial, the second trial began in March 2021. The prosecution argued that Hayne had no reasonable grounds for believing the woman would have consented to any sexual activity that evening but felt entitled to it.

Hayne was found guilty from that trial of two counts of sexual assault, and he was found not guilty, though it’s worth noting of a more serious charge which alleged he’d intentionally or recklessly physically harmed her,”

Barbour Gatt said.

After the trial in 2021, Hayne was sentenced to five years and eight months in prison. He had a non-parole period of three years and eight months, and he was sentenced to that in May 2021.

He appealed that decision in February of last year, and his convictions ended up being overturned on appeal, and he spent nine months in prison. At that point, he walked free from Cooma Correctional Center on February 15,”

she said.

Barbour Gatt said he was granted that appeal because his barrister had successfully argued that the jury had been given profoundly wrong legal direction.

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