Thursday, October 03, 2013

Reasonable grounds to suspect

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Now that we have search on "reasonable grounds to suspect" the commission of an offence, a lesser threshold than the reasonable ...

Ethnicity, deprivation, and manifest inadequacy of sentence

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In the absence of legislation requiring special consideration at sentencing for the ethnicity of the offender, the relevance of social depri...
Monday, September 23, 2013

Compulsion and willingness

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I should add some comments to the summary of Akulue v R posted here on 19 September 2013. Affirmative defences Akulue concerns an affirma...
Thursday, September 19, 2013

Must you? The statutory defence of compulsion.

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The defence of compulsion may be thought of as a subset of the defence of necessity. The former is, in New Zealand, a statutory , and the la...
Sunday, August 25, 2013

Now we are nine

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 If you are wondering (and I know you aren't) how to observe this, the beginning of the tenth year of this site, you could: Study the pr...
Monday, August 19, 2013

Eyewitness identification warnings

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Getting judges to obey the law on eyewitness identification A rigorous application of statutory requirements for identification warnings is ...
Friday, August 09, 2013

Statutory interpretation, causation and responsibility for accidental death

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Causation is the critical consideration in Hughes v R [ 2013] UKSC 56 (31 July 2013). The offences under analysis, punishable by imprisonm...
Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Common law contempt by disobedience of an order for temporary suppression of a judgment

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A non-publication order was issued by the High Court in respect of a pre-trial judgment on evidential issues. The order was made to protect ...
Monday, July 15, 2013

A murky corner of the criminal law: punishment and dignity

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Some annoyance has been expressed in the United Kingdom over the Strasbourg court's Grand Chamber decision in Vinter v United Kingdom ...
Saturday, July 13, 2013

Controversial use of the presumption of innocence

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The extended meaning given by the European Court of Human Rights to the presumption of innocence (Art 6 § 2 of the Convention) requires a c...
Saturday, July 06, 2013

Book review: “Law as a Leap of Faith” by John Gardner

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A hankering for some difficult reading led me to click on "buy now" for the hard cover edition of " Law as a Leap of Faith ...
Tuesday, July 02, 2013

Rational sentencing

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In Elias v The Queen [ 2013] HCA 31 (27 June 2013) a common law principle of sentencing was clarified: a sentence is determined in relatio...
Thursday, June 27, 2013

Criminal process, compulsory interrogation, statutory construction, and the right to a fair trial

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When might a statute impliedly compromise fundamental rights connected with criminal proceedings? This issue was at the heart of X7 v Austra...
Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Dissent on the Fifth Amendment, helpful judgment writing, and the permanence of grades

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Pre-trial, non-custodial, silence by a voluntarily cooperating person, during police questioning, was the subject of a prosecutor's invi...
Sunday, June 16, 2013

When trials do not have to be “according to law”

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Does a trial always have to be "according to law"? No. Being in accordance with the law is not a sufficient condition for a lawful...