Limits to Supervisory Jurisdiction of the High Court
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/002201839906300611 |
| Published date | 01 December 1999 |
| Date | 01 December 1999 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Limits
to
Supervisory
Jurisdiction
of the
High
Court
properly
even
though
some ancillary part is not. The House of Lords,
in
DPP
v
McKeown
(above), held that
the
fact
that
the
clock on
an
Intoximeter was
not
working properly did
not
mean
that the operation
of
the
computer
itself could be, for
that
reason alone, declared to be
unreliable.
It
would appear
that
where, as here, there is a dispute as to
whether
acomputer is working properly, there ought to be a trial within
a trial. At first, it was
thought
that
the
purpose of
that
trial would be to
determine
whether
the
requirements both of s 69 of
PACE
and s 24 of
the
Criminal Justice Act 1988 were satisfied (see R v
Minors,
R v
Harper
[1983] 1 WLR 441),
but
that
opinion of the Court of Appeal was
not
accepted by
the
House of Lords in R v
Shepherd
[1993] 2 WLR 277 in
which it was held
that
the
trial would determine the admissibility
under
s 69 alone.
It
may be remarked that, although
the
decision in Rv
Governor
of
Penton
ville
Prison,
ex p
Osman
[1990] 1 WLR 281 was
upon
facts not directly in point in
the
present case, the
judgment
suggests that
where
adocument produced by a computer is accepted and stored as a
record, the courts, in
the
absence of any internal evidence of malfunc-
tioning,
may
rely
on
the
inference that
the
computer was working
properly. Here,
the
potential evidence of a trained operator was
that
the
machine was working in accordance with
the
requirements of s 69
and
that
this was so, notwithstanding
the
defect in the printout. Upon
that
basis,
the
printout would be admissible in evidence.
3.
It
followed that
the
magistrate was
not
entitled to acquit
the
defendant. On
the
question
whether
the case should be remitted for
further hearing, it was pointed
out
that
the success of
the
original
submission of no case to
answer
was
that
the
service engineer's evidence
was
never
given
and
that
at any re-hearing it might
not
be available.
It
was also argued
that
by
the
time of re-hearing, the case would be too
stale to be re-heard. The court, while accepting
the
possibility of
both
these arguments turning
out
to be true, pointed
out
that
the
absence of
the
evidence
and
the
delay were due to
the
respondent's having relied
on a point which
the
court
had
now
found to be untenable. The
question of
the
effect of
the
delay was (as it always is)
whether
that
delay makes it unfair, prejudicial or oppressive to remit
the
case to
the
magistrate. As it was
the
court's opinion that that course could have
none
of those consequences,
the
case was remitted for re-hearing.
Limits to Supervisory Jurisdiction of the High Court
R v
Maidstone
CC,
ex p
Harrow
LBC
[1999] 3 All ER 542
A
man
was arrested and charged with arson. He was committed for trial
and remanded in custody. Three months later, an order was
made
under
s 34 of the Mental Health Act 1983 transferring him to hospital. He was
later returned to prison,
where
four medical opinions were obtained,
which showed aconsensus that, although he was fit to plead, he was, at
the
time at which he- was alleged to have committed
the
act of arson,
insane. He had originally pleaded
not
guilty to
the
offences charged in
529
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