The prosecutor invited the jury to convict contrary to the evidence of his own witness. The Crown had called a witness to establish a crucial fact, as it saw it, that the knife used in the killing on the ground floor had been kept upstairs and therefore must have been taken by the defendant in order to stab the deceased. The witness, contrary to her pre-trial statement, gave evidence that the knife had in fact been downstairs. When prosecution counsel in his final speech started to cast doubt upon the credit of his own witness, he was stopped by the judge on the normal principle that a party is not entitled to attack the credit of its own witness unless it seeks, and is permitted, to treat that witness as hostile.
Held: The resulting conviction was unsafe. This amounted to the Crown impeaching the credit of its own witness: ‘It was not open to the prosecutor to attack her credit. All they could do was to point to inconsistencies, if they existed, between her evidence and other evidence or to point to matters upon which her evidence might be unreliable.’
Citations:
Times 03-Mar-1994
Statutes:
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Regina v Cairns; Regina v Zaldi, Regina v Chaudary CACD 22-Nov-2002
The defendants applied for the defence statements of co-defendants to be disclosed. A co-defendant was to give evidence for the Crown, and they sought to have it excluded as unreliable.
Held: The 1996 Act created a duty of secondary . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Criminal Practice
Updated: 08 October 2022; Ref: scu.87509