R v Foxford
| Jurisdiction | Northern Ireland |
| Judgment Date | 01 January 1974 |
| Date | 01 January 1974 |
| Court | Court of Criminal Appeal (Northern Ireland) |
Boy shot by soldier - Whether unlawful and dangerous act - Whether gross negligence - Verdict of manslaughter - Failure of Crown to call certain witnesses at trial - Inadmissible statements put to accused in cross-examination - Whether trial proper -Whether verdict unsafe and unsatisfactory.
The accused, a soldier, was charged with the manslaughter of a twelve year old boy while on night patrol in a hostile area. There had been some disturbances in the area before the shooting and the accused's defence was that he had fired in self-defence at a gunman who had just shot at his patrol. In finding the accused guilty of manslaughter the trial judge held that there was no evidence to support the accused's allegation that the boy had fired at the patrol and considered it doubtful if the accused saw the deceased at all. Firing a rifle at night, without proper aim, into a street where members of the public had been, constituted gross negligence. The accused appealed on the grounds that, inter alia, witnesses should have been excluded from the court when not giving evidence; the Crown should have supplied certain statements to the defence; that the trial was irregular in that the Crown failed to call two witnesses, D and L, after stating in opening the case, that the Crown would rely on their evidence; and in that an inadmissible statement was tendered to the accused in cross-examination. Held, by the Court of Criminal Appeal, that while there was evidence upon which the appellant could properly have been convicted, the conviction should be quashed because: (i) by alluding in his opening speech to the evidence of witnesses D and L (whose names were on the back of the indictment and whose evidence was favourable to the accused) and then closing the Crown case without calling them, Crown counsel had indicated to the trial judge that those witnesses were, in the opinion of...
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Berry v The Queen
... ... Reg. v. Maguire [ 1992 ] 2 W.L.R. 767 , C.A. applied ... Reg. v. Purvis and Hughes ( 1968 ) 13 W.I.R. 507 ; Reg. v. Barrett ( 1970 ) 12 J.L.R. 179 ; Reg. v. Grant and Hewitt ( 1971 ) 12 J.L.R. 585 and Reg. v. Foxford [ 1974 ] N.I. 181 approved ... (2) That the judge's failure to direct the jury adequately as to the defendant's previous good character was a material misdirection which could have caused injustice to him; that at any stage of the trial the jury were entitled to the judge's assistance on ... ...
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...or the subsequent appeal. The obligation to make pre-trial disclosure at common law was considered by the Court of Appeal in R v Foxford [1974] NI 181. That was a case dealing with the production of previous statements made by Crown witnesses. The court considered that if the facts relating......
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Berry v R
...the present appeal, are illustrated by a passage in the judgement of the Court of Criminal Appeal in Northern Ireland in R. v. Foxford [1974] N.I. 181 at p. 200:– “Where in the ordinary course a person gives a statement to the police and later comes to give evidence for the Crown, the defen......
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In the matter of Daly (Deceased)
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