Recent Judicial Decisions
| Published date | 01 May 1965 |
| Date | 01 May 1965 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032258X6503800514 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
W.
H.
D.
WINDER,
M.A.,
LL.M.
Legal Correspondent
I?fTHE
POLICE
JOURNAL
MENTAL CONDITION
OF
WITNESS:
MEDICAL EVIDENCE
Toohey v. Metropolitan Police Commissioner
The degree
of
personal reliability of a witness is of fundamental
importance in any kind
of
trial so
that
it is somewhat surprising
that
the point now authoritatively settled by the House of Lords in this
case ([1965] 2 W.L. R. 439) has very rarely been judicially considered
in the past. The point can be shortly put as it was at the end of the
judgment in which the five members of the House unanimously
concurred. If a witness purports to give evidence of something which
he believes that he has seen at a distance of 50 yds., it must surely be
possible to 'call the evidence of an oculist to the effect that the witness
could not possibly see anything at a greater distance
that
20 yds., or
the evidence of a surgeon who had removed acataract from which
the witness was suffering at the material time and which would have
prevented him from seeing what he thought he saw.
"So,
too ", the
House declared,
"must
it be allowable to call medical evidence of
mental illness which makes a witness incapable of giving reliable
evidence, whether through the existence of delusions or otherwise ",
In the particular case the unreliability, according to the medical
evidence, was due to hysteria. On appeal the prosecution did not ask
for such evidence to be rejected since, in the Crown's view, the im-
portant thing was
that
the jury should be enabled to arrive at the
truth
and
do justice.
In the result the appellant's conviction at his second trial at which
this kind
of
evidence was rejected was quashed. The jury had
disagreed at the first trial. At the first trial the medical evidence
was admitted without question. The appellant was tried, with two
other men, on a count of assault with intent to rob a boy aged 16.
The prosecution's case was based mainly on the boy's evidence as to
the alleged assault. There was also evidence of two police officers
who stated that they came upon the accused and the boy in an alley-
way, the boy being in a dishevelled
and
hysterical state and asking
for police help, while the defendants were denying the assault. They
248 May 1965
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