Supreme Court of Appeal judges have explained why they ruled that acquitting Charlie Star of the rape of a 17-year-old girl at a Kergunyah birthday party in 2017 was the "only appropriate course".
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Star was released last month after serving more than a year in jail, when he successfully appealed the guilty verdict a County Court jury came to when he faced trial last year.
He and friend Mitchell Bowran, both 20 years old at the time, were each charged with multiple counts of rape over the incident behind a shed at the party on the night of September 2, 2017.
They have maintained the sexual encounter was consensual.
Star was found guilty of one count of rape by anal penetration, not guilty of vaginal penetration and was undecided on the third charge.
Bowran was found not guilty on four counts of rape and the jury was undecided on the fifth.
In a decision released publicly this week, Court of Appeal judges Chris Maxwell, Karin Emerton and Mark Weinberg said there was "no rational explanation" for the jury's decision to find Star guilty of one sexual act, but not guilty of another sexual act that both he and the victim said followed immediately afterwards.
The difference between Star and the victim's evidence was that she claimed both were acts of rape, while he said said both acts were consensual.
"The delivery of a single guilty verdict, in a case where eight charges are laid based on events occurring in a single continuous incident, is an unusual and surprising result," the judges said.
"There was nothing in the circumstances which could have explained the jury's unanimity on charge 6 (rape by anal penetration).
"Having concluded that the verdict on charge 6 could not stand, we decided that the only appropriate course was to direct that there be a verdict of acquittal on that charge."
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Star's defence barrister Dermot Dann QC had argued the jury's single verdict of guilty could not be reconciled, logically or rationally, with the jury's other not guilty verdicts.
He had also claimed there was "an unacceptable level of confusion" in the trial when it came to evidence relating to the charge in question, and that the County Court judge had given a "fundamental misdescription" of the case made on behalf of Star when addressing the jury to sum up the case at the end of the trial.
Both of these latter points were rejected by the Court of Appeal judges.
The verdict brings to an end lengthy criminal proceedings in this case - the first County Court trial in Wodonga in February 2019 was abandoned after the jury was discharged without coming to a verdict, before the retrial was held in Melbourne in July 2019.
