The defendant appealed against his conviction for conspiracy and corrupt acceptance of bribes. One of the witnesses for the prosecution was a person engaged in pornography and who had allegedly bribed the defendant. The Court considered the evidential status of diary entries used by a witness to refresh his memory of dates and events in which he was involved. The diary was admitted into evidence without objection.
Held: Those entries were not capable of amounting to corroboration of the evidence of the witness who was an accomplice of the accused. Geoffrey Lane LJ said that the nature of the diary entries was such that if the jury thought they were genuine they might show a degree of consistency in the witness – much in the way that a prompt complaint by a victim of sexual assault might be used by a jury as bolstering the complainant’s evidence, but the entries could not be used as evidence of the truth of their contents: ‘There is always a danger in circumstances such as these when attention has been focused on a particular document for a long period of time, and when the document has been subjected to a minute and line by line analysis as these diaries were that the document will achieve an importance which it does not warrant. It was most important in this case that the status of these diaries should be clearly understood throughout the trial and particularly at the end of the trial when the learned judge came to sum up the matter to the jury . . Those diaries were never more, at best, than a means whereby Humphreys might be able to give accurate dates and accurate chapter and verse for the incidents in respect of which he was giving evidence. They were never more than documents prepared by Humphreys and Humphreys was a self-confessed dealer in pornography. He was an accomplice and he was, on any view, a highly unsavoury character in many other ways. His evidence, par excellence, required corroboration.’
Judges:
Geoffrey Lane LJ
Citations:
(1978) 67 Cr App R 323
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Chinn, Regina v CACD 15-Mar-2012
The defendant appealed against his conviction for a serious assault. He argued that the prosecution should not have been allowed to introduce parts of a witness’ statement where the witness could not remember the underlying events directly.
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Criminal Evidence
Updated: 23 May 2022; Ref: scu.452166