Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Deceit from a distance

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Today our Supreme Court held that a person who, outside New Zealand, causes a copy of a document to be created in this country (here, by sen...
Monday, December 18, 2006

Extended secondary liability

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To be guilty of serious crime you must intend to do the prohibited thing. Intention is the fundamental requirement for liability. Those two ...
Friday, December 15, 2006

Reliability and hearsay

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Yesterday, the Supreme Court of Canada made some observations on hearsay that are relevant to issues that will arise in New Zealand under ou...
Monday, December 11, 2006

The balance of probabilities

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Sometimes, cases that are not quite interesting enough to warrant a blog entry here, nevertheless contain dicta that are worth noting. Such...
Monday, December 04, 2006

Attempting to conspire

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A good example of a policy decision about the scope of criminal law comes from the Supreme Court of Canada in R v Dery [2006] SCC 53 (23 No...
Monday, October 30, 2006

November hiatus

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Its time for a vacation! Blog entries will resume in December. 

Perceptions of bias

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Despite their almost constant preoccupation with the fairness of trials, some senior appellate courts still have difficulty in appreciating ...
Friday, October 27, 2006

"Perverse" acquittal, or "conscience" verdict?

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One of the things that keeps appellate courts busy is the tendency of judges to overlook the fundamentals of the law. I noted one such funda...
Wednesday, October 18, 2006

"Unfair to try" or "to try unfairly"?

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Boolell v The State (Mauritius) [2006] UKPC 46 (16 October 2006) illustrates the difference between the questions, (i) whether the trial wa...
Thursday, October 05, 2006

NZ criminal law may be fair!

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Readers of these blogs will be pleased to see that criticisms of Moloney v New Zealand (see blog entry for 3 May 2006, and the article deve...

Challenging detention pending bail

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 A prompt and automatic opportunity to challenge the lawfulness of detention is a key provision to prevent arbitrary detention and to protec...
Monday, October 02, 2006

Going international

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Strip searches that are not carried out in compliance with proper safeguards to protect the dignity of those being searched may attract reme...
Monday, September 11, 2006

Negligent Barristers

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Negligent barristers will – or should, despite their negligence – sit up straight and contemplate the Supreme Court’s removal of barristers’...
Friday, August 25, 2006

Checking the foundations

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On this, the second anniversary of the start of this blogsite, when I am about to comment on a case where the meaning of "beyond reason...
Thursday, August 24, 2006

The absolute right to a fair trial

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The Supreme Court of New Zealand has accepted that the accused’s right to a fair trial is absolute, that breach of this right is a substanti...
Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Public debates on admissibility

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Should the courts encourage public discussion of judicial decisions about the admissibility of evidence? This is one of the important questi...
Monday, July 31, 2006

Reverse onus in the House of Lords

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While we in New Zealand await our Supreme Court’s decision in Hansen v R , which will decide the standard of proof placed on the accused by ...
Friday, July 28, 2006

Differences in principle and pragmatism

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Appellate judges often disagree over whether an error at trial caused a substantial miscarriage of justice. Finding himself in a minority of...
Friday, July 21, 2006

Fairer than you may want

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The right to a fair trial is a right that the accused cannot waive. This may seem a strange statement: why would the accused ever want to wa...
Thursday, July 20, 2006

Public privacy

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Courts may disagree over whether language is “grossly” offensive. In DPP v Collins [2006] UKHL 40 (19 July 2006) the House of Lords unanimou...
Friday, June 30, 2006

Our case against you is secret ...

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No one could be surprised that included in the guarantees recognised as indispensable by civilised peoples are the right, when on trial, to ...
Wednesday, June 28, 2006

The Ellis case and trial fairness

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For a draft paper on the trial of Peter Ellis for sexual offending at the Christchurch Civic Creche, see my web site, and follow the links t...
Thursday, June 15, 2006

A look at torts ...

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During this strangely extended lacuna between interesting criminal cases around the world, we have a moment to glance at yesterday’s decisio...