She was 25 at the time. Cook was 38. When jailing Cook last May, County Court judge Gerard Mullaly said the victim had become "in many respects, a broken woman" after the rapes. "She wrote in her victim impact statement that, prior to this, she was a confident, friendly, social person, but now that is lost to her," Judge Mullaly said. "She found it impossible to do many ordinary daily things in her house and with her children after the rapes ... It became impossible for her to use her bedroom where the rapes had occurred. "She wrote as to that: 'The lounge room became my bedroom as I was too petrified to go back into the bedroom where he punished me by raping me. I was too scared to walk back in there to get my clothes. Every time I tried, fear would stop me, the flashbacks. It was the torture room'."

Judge Mullaly said the woman had been unable to work after her ordeals and had been forced to move house to get away from the scene of her degradations. He jailed Cook for eight years and five months, with six years to serve before being eligible for parole. But on Wednesday, the Court of Appeal accepted Cook's claim that there had been a miscarriage of justice, and ruled that he deserved a retrial because Judge Mullaly had not adhered to arcane courtroom rules during the trial. Under long-standing practice in Victoria, defence lawyers must have a clear view of the faces of potential jurors in a trial, so that they can "challenge" a person being on the jury. During the jury selection process, known as empanelment, an accused person has the right, through their lawyer, to challenge up to six potential jurors without having to give any reason.

In their published decision, Justices Mark Weinberg, Stephen Kaye and Robert Redlich said Judge Mullaly had not given Cook this right. "During the empanelment process, the trial judge directed that when a jury member's number was drawn from the ballot, the juror was to stand up and walk directly to the jury box to take his or her seat," they said. "They were not required to walk past the accused in the dock." The appeal judges said that for an accused person to be able to properly challenge a juror, they must be able to "visually inspect" them. This had not been done, they said. "Accordingly, there was a fundamental irregularity in the empanelment process that went to the root of the trial."

In December, the Court of Appeal granted another Victorian man convicted of rape a retrial after ruling he had not had the chance to eyeball potential jurors. That man - who had been convicted of five counts of rape but had his convictions quashed by the Court of Appeal - is due to face retrial in November. Different County Court judges oversaw the two cases sent for retrial.