ALEX Salmond missed the key vote on the principal law he was prosecuted under.
On 10 June 2009, the then First minister was the only one of the SNP’s 47 MSPs not to back his own Government’s Sexual Offences (Scotland) Bill at its third and final Holyrood stage.
Also an MP, he was in Westminster, speaking in an SNP-led debate.
Mr Salmond knows all about the legislation now.
The law was used for 11 of the 13 charges he faced on the final indictment.
It repealed a series of common law sexual offences and replaced them with statutory ones.
The new stautory offence of sexual assault was intended to cover incidents where the “victim did not consent to the sexual conduct in question and the perpetrator had no reasonable belief that the victim was consenting”.
It also said that for an offence to be committed the perpetrator must “either act intentionally or recklessly when carrying” out one of four types of specified sexual acts.
Two of the four acts made up the bulk of the allegations against Mr Salmond - touching the victim in a sexual way and “having sexual physical contact with the victim, whether directly or through clothing”.
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