KEY POINTS:
Here's the grim story you might expect to read in the daily paper.
A 17-year-old girl was walking home to her grandmother's house in Gisborne's rough, tough Kaiti neighbourhood, police said, when she was accosted by six men in an alleyway. One held a knife to her throat
and tried to kiss her, then another raped her against a fence.
The rapist used a condom that he took from a packet.
The ordeal lasted nearly five minutes. The girl told police the rapist was Joseph Donnelly, a distant relative who called himself an uncle.
Traumatised and confused, she fled. On running into an old school friend, she caught a taxi to the pub, the Record Reign, with him.
But leaving the pub a while later, she again encountered Donnelly in his car in the parking lot.
Donnelly was a former Mongrel Mob member, his face covered in gang tattoos, with a criminal record for drugs and indecent assault.
Still fearful, the girl agreed to get into his car with her school friend and, after the friend got out, she says Donnelly again tried to "do the dirty" atop Kaiti Hill.
Eventually Donnelly dropped her off at her aunt's home - where she told family that she had been raped.
At the scene of the alleged rape, police found a condom with DNA that, tests showed, was 100,000 million times more like to be Donnelly's than another man's.
The police believed Donnelly had raped the girl. The prosecution believed he had raped her. The jury agreed, and in 2006 he was jailed.
Now, here's the story you don't expect to read.
Last week, after serving 18 months of a 10-year sentence in Mangaroa Prison, Joseph Quintin Donnelly, now aged 43, walked out of court free.
At a retrial at the High Court in Gisborne, a second jury had found him not guilty.
As his lawyers consider a compensation claim, an exhausted Donnelly told the Herald on Sunday: "The police have taken everything away from me - all they can take. No amount of money will fix that. My family will never be the same, my life will never be the same."
One of his defence barristers, Charl Hirschfeld, had told jury members that the incriminating condom had not been there when the police first searched the scene, but had been planted a day later in an attempt by Donnelly's brother, Hemara, to frame him.
The court heard Hemara held a "pathological hatred" towards his brother and would stop at nothing to implicate him in a crime he did not commit. Since Donnelly was four or five years old, Hemara had been cruel to his younger brother: he had put Donnelly in hospital, stabbed him a couple of times, tried to cut his fingers off.
A condom wrapper found at the scene, that might have proved Donnelly's innocence, had disappeared from the exhibits - police said the cleaners had disposed of the evidence.
And, at the time of the alleged rape, witnesses backed up Donnelly's insistence that he was already parked outside the pub, excluded from entering by his gang tattoos.
Jury members might not want Donnelly as a next door neighbour, Hirschfeld said - but they could not dismiss his candour in putting all his cards on the table.
"It takes a lot of guts for an ex-Mongrel Mob member to say in this courtroom that he has been framed for rape," he added.
"Mr Donnelly does not naively come to this court imagining for a moment that you will not have an appreciation about his past.
"Mr Donnelly does not want, nor expect, you to see him anything like a paragon of virtue - but he does ask for fairness in considering his case."
Now, Donnelly says he wishes he had never agreed to give the girl a ride home from the pub.
On the drive, he says, she had confided in him that she had been sexually abused as a child by a close family member. He had stopped at a Caltex service station and bought them both meat pies.
"In hindsight, I should have jammed on the brakes, opened the door and kicked her to the kerb. And that's the honest truth and how I feel now. I mean, shit, she got me by the heartstrings," he confides.
Donnelly says that in his months behind bars, he would wake up in a cold sweat, thinking it was all a nightmare. "I'd walk around the jail okay but, beyond closed doors, f**k I used to do everything I could. The only thing that kept me sane was my kids and my family. They know me and they never doubted me once."
Back home, after his conviction was overturned and while he awaited his retrial, Donnelly had much of his body covered with orange and yellow tattoos: a devil, snakes, flames. He says: "This is where I have been for the last five years - I have been in hell."
Elated at finally being acquitted, Donnelly says he feels as if his feet aren't touching the ground.
"I feel I am walking on water, but I think only one fella has been able to do that, eh!
"I say, like that ad on TV, don't judge me till you know me.
"But you know, without dissing on the police, and without trying to rub it in, I think they misjudged me, too."
