A man found guilty of stalking after leaving threatening messages on a woman’s phone has lost an appeal against his conviction.

Maurice Harvey Jr was found guilty following a Magistrates’ Court trial of stalking Beverley Pitt between January and March 2013.

During the trial, the court had heard Harvey had animosity towards someone with whom he once had a relationship. Ms Pitt had taken steps to prevent Harvey from contacting the third party, sending him a “no trespass letter”.

He then began to repeatedly call Ms Pitt on her private phone, and on one occasion said words to the effect of: “You don’t know me. I’ll kill you.”

Fearing for her safety, she reported the phone calls to the police. According to a written judgment by Chief Justice Ian Kawaley, Harvey sought to appeal his conviction on the grounds that the court had erred in allowing prosecutors to put forward new evidence after it had closed its case.

Prosecutor Susan Mulligan acknowledged during the appeals hearing that the Crown had introduced new evidence — messages left on the complainant’s voicemail — after it had closed its case. However, she explained that the Crown only learned about the recordings after the victim had finished on the stand, and that it was the defendant himself who insisted on the recordings being played in the court.

Lawyer Bruce Swan, representing Harvey, also argued that the trial judge had failed to identify the evidence of mens rea required for the offence in his judgment.

The Chief Justice found that Mr Swan was correct in a “very limited technical sense”, stating that the judgment did not have a flawless finding in connection to the mental element of the case, but looking at the judgment as a whole it was unfair to say that element had been overlooked.

“The learned Magistrate notes the appellant’s admission in the witness box that he engaged in ‘hostile, offensive and threatening conduct’,” he wrote. “This was, in effect, a finding that the appellant admittedly knew that the calls were likely to cause an apprehension or fear for the complainant’s safety. In substance, no misdirection or error of law occurred.”

He ruled that both grounds of appeal had failed.