Do you find the information on the blog helpful? Turns out, the blog doesn't render properly in Internet Explorer 5: there's a suggestions icon on the right-hand side of the page that should always float in view, but you might find it waaaay down the bottom of the page. Feel free to offer ideas or suggest …
Month: March 2009
Defendant ordered to pay prosecution costs
Section 18(1) of the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985 (UK) provides:Where...(a) any person is convicted of an offence before a magistrates’ court;(b) ...(c) any person is convicted of an offence before the Crown Court;the court may make such as order as to the costs to be paid by the accused to the prosecutor as it …
Problems downloading cases?
I discovered today that computers in my building can't download cases from Austlii!(Dr Manhattan's Edit: it's not an isolated phenomenon. Company or site servers readily identify the kinds of benign or helpful scripts that are there to help you as the kind of internet nasties which are there to steal your credit card information and …
Changing plea
I remember many moons ago when I first encountered this then-strange phenomenon, when an accused person asked to withdraw their plea of guilty. I had never heard of it, and my instinctive reaction was to insist it wasn't possible. Fortunately, rather than expose my ignorance, I kept quiet and went away to investigate.Now that I …
Propensity evidence and uncharged acts
I just finished reading through R v Sadler [2008] VSCA 198.It's an interesting case from the Court of Appeal on two main issues.The first issue was about the permissible extent of cross-examination going to credit under s 37 of the Evidence Act 1958. (The equivalent in the new Evidence Act 2008 is found in ss …