Judicial Committee of the Privy Council
| Date | 01 October 1998 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002201839806200506 |
| Author | JA Coutts |
| Published date | 01 October 1998 |
| Subject Matter | Judicial Committee of the Privy Council |
JUDICIAL COMMITTEE OF
THE
PRIVY COUNCIL
JURY INFORMED OF VOIR DIRE
Mitchell v The Queen
A man and his wife were murdered in their home and their truck was
stolen. The truck was found nearby and the police arrested the appellant
in Mitchell v The Queen
[1998]
2 WLR 839, who had been seen near the
place here the truck was found. They alleged that he had made an oral
confession which was written down and signed by him, that he had shown
them where the truck was parked, had demonstrated in the house how the
murder was committed by stabbing and (after saying that he had thrown
the knife in the sea) had shown them where he had hidden it in some
undergrowth near the house, and had indicated where they could find the
keys to the house. He was interviewed on several occasions by the police,
but on each occasion a lawyer was present from the Attorney General's
office,
who stated that he was there as an observer 'to see fair play' and
that he had seen everything that occurred during all the interviews. At the
trial,
however,
the defendant alleged that the confession was not voluntary,
as he had been beaten and had received electric shock treatment and other
painful and degrading ill-treatment. He denied that he had pointed out to
the police the evidence which they had produced. He also claimed an alibi
and, when asked why he had not mentioned it earlier in the proceedings,
he said that he did not know what was meant by the term and pointed to
the fact that he was then unrepresented. However that may be, the person
whom he produced to support his story said that
it
was the night before
the murder, not the night of the murder, on which they had stayed together
in the house named by the defendant. During the trial, two events
occurred, both of which were condemned by the Privy Council. First, it
was in front of the jury that the defendant's objection to the introduction
of evidence of the confessions first came to light. When the judge asked
counsel whether she would be objecting to that evidence, and resisting its
admissibility, she 'blurted out in graphic detail' the reason for her
objection, in the form of details of the ill-treatment. Secondly, after the
voir dire, in which the judge found that the confessions were voluntary, the
information of what had occurred at the voir dire was put before the jury
in the summing up. The defendant was convicted and his conviction
upheld by the Court of Appeal of the Bahamas, but he appealed further,
to the Privy Council, challenging the voluntariness of the confessions and
the propriety of revealing to the jury what had happened at the voir dire.
When it was proposed to call evidence of the confessions, the judge's
question to counsel as to whether she had objected had been asked with
the intention of eliciting no more than a monosyllabic 'yes' or 'no' but
that led to a preliminary airing of the question before the jury. This was
followed by the voir dire in the absence of the jury (as the defence agreed
it should be).
It
was, however, reported in detail in a local newspaper, but,
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