Sir John Owen: Judge who tried a case which led to a change in the law on rape, and also presided over the Tony Martin trial

Sir John Owen was a distinguished advocate and judge whose long career involved him not only in a number of prominent criminal cases but also, more unusually, in two decades of ecclesiastical adjudication. As the splendidly named Dean of the Arches, he headed for two decades the Consistory Court of the Church of England, a medieval body which attracted attention only when it passed judgement on allegedly sexually errant clergy.

Adultery cases also played a part in his early legal career: in the 1950s, in the days of uncontested divorces, he developed a highly lucrative sideline by dealing with up to a dozen of them a day. A close relative said of hisinvolvement in the adultery business: "He very much enjoyed working in the church because he was a verycommitted and convinced Christian throughout his life. But he was also a pragmatist – that's the code of the Bar, isn't it?"

John Arthur Dalziel Owen was born in 1925 in Stockport, attending Solihull School and Oxford, where he read law in line with family tradition: both his grandfathers and an uncle had been lawyers. When the Second World War intervened he briefly served in the Royal Navy before spending several years in India, where he attended the Indian military academy. Receiving a commission in the Gurkha Rifles, he served with them during the tense run-up to independence.

Returning to England in 1947 he went back to Oxford to finish his degree. At this time he also met his future wife, Valerie Ethell. Not long after they met he told her he was going to marry her and that she would need to read two books to make things easier. One was entitled Life At The Bar and the other The Gurkha. She began this task but in recent weeks told her family that, sadly, she had not yet found the time to finish either.

Another of his interests which his wife had difficulty in appreciating was cricket. He liked the game but fell into the category of those who liked their cricket boring, preferring its finer points to its more thrilling moments. Once in the 1960s he took her to Edgbaston. She remarked after a couple of hours of turgid prodding, during which 30 runs had been scored with no wickets falling, that it was not very interesting.

"I should hope not," he replied indignantly, for to him cricket was more akin to meditation than sport. He refused to applaud at times of high excitement, believing that cricket and fun should not mix.

Called to the Bar in 1951, he practised as a barrister on the Midlands circuit, specialising in crime, where the cases sometimes gave him scope for a certain theatricality. Drama,he appeared to feel, may have beenunwelcome in cricket but was acceptable in court.

According to his family, Owen "appears to have been the model of an establishment man, and of course he was. He believed in the rule of law. He was socially conservative. He was moderate in his appetites."

He took silk in 1970 and went on to become a judge at the Old Bailey and later the High Court. He prosecuted, defended and adjudicated in casesof murders, robberies, rapes, frauds and thefts. Over time he came to believe that the reason why criminals offended was that they lacked the imagination to realise the effect their acts would have on victims. It was said he could not imagine how people could harm others knowing the pain they would cause.

In his eyes perhaps the high point of his judicial career, and one of the cases which most exercised him personally, was the 1991 trial which led to a change in the law on rape within marriage. Until then men were generally deemed immune from a charge of raping their wives.

It was in 1736 that Sir Matthew Hale laid down that a man could not rape his wife because she had given a general consent to intercourse by getting married. Since then various exceptions had arisen to Hale's rule, such as cases where the wife had moved away and sought divorce. Owen ruled, in a manner then regarded as legally daring, that marital immunity for rape had been whittled away by judicial decisions over the past 40 years.

In the case he heard the husband had forced his way into the home of his wife's parents, where she had gone to live while arranging a divorce. Owen ruled that this meant she hadwithdrawn any implied consent tointercourse. His decision was upheld first in the Court of Appeal and then in the House of Lords, which laid down that the days had gone when "the wife must be the subservient chattel ofthe husband."

Owen was also the judge at first instance in the prosecution of Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer whose action of shooting at two burglars, and killing one of them, excited huge public interest. Martin's conviction for murder was reduced on appeal to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, although Owen's directions to the jury on self-defence and other matters were endorsed by Lord Woolf in his appeal judgment.

When Owen prosecuted in several IRA cases his security became a concern. On one occasion an unexpected package with a Northern Ireland postmark appeared at his home. The bomb squad was called and a controlled explosion was carried out: it blew pages from a bible, sent by a religious group, all over his barn. The group had succeeded in its aim of disseminating the gospel, though not quite in the way it had envisaged.

Sir John retired in 2000, shortly afterwards stepping down after 20 years as Dean of the Arches. After his death his family asked for donations to be divided in line with two of his lifelong interests, his local church and the Gurkha Welfare Trust.

John Arthur Dalziel Owen, lawyer: born Stockport 22 November 1925; a Judge of the High Court of Justice, Queen's Bench Division 1986–2000; Dean, Arches Court of Canterbury and Auditor, Chancery Court of York, and Master of the Faculty Office 1980–2000; Kt 1986; married 1952 Valerie Ethell (one son, one daughter); died 9 December 2010.