There is no common law privilege against incriminating your spouse.There never has been, it seems. Centuries ago in Britain a wife was neither competent or compellable to give evidence against her husband due to the legal fiction (derived from the Bible) that man and wife were the one flesh. Even by the time of the …
Tag: high court
Aggravated burglary
Aggravated burglary is capable of being dealt with summarily (provided the accused consents to jurisdiction) because of Schedule 2 of the Criminal Procedure Act 2009.If it wasn't specifically included at clause 4 the offence wouldn't be triable summarily, because the 25 year maximum sentence far exceeds the limit allowed the Magistrates' Court of Victoria by …
Lithgow City Council v Jackson [2011] HCA 36: hearsay, lay opinion evidence and business documents
Sometimes the wheels of justice grind very slowly.The High Court heard appeals from this case twice, most recently delivering its decision on 28 September 2011. The NSW Court of Appeal also dealt with the matter twice. On its face it's a fairly simple negligence action arising from a fall in a public park one night …
(Some) suspended sentences to go
Some of the Sentencing Amendment Act 2010 (discussed last year here) commences operation on 1 May 2011 (see Special Gazette, S125, 19 Apr 2011), namely:Section 3 (definitions) — except paragraphs (b) – (e) which repeal CSO, ICO and CCTO as part of the introduction of the proposed intensive correction management orderSection 12 (suspended sentences)Section 27 (transitional provisions inserted …
Miller v Miller [2011] HCA 9: Drink, drive, bloody negligent?
The High Court's decision in Miller v Miller raises again the general question of the ability of a party to a joint criminal enterprise to sue another party to the caper. The decision undoes the inflexible approach of previous unaninimous High Court decisions (Smith v Jenkins and Gala v Preston) that one illegal user of …
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