New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal

The case is called RS and Commissioner for Police, and as always, the citations will be in the show notes.

So this is a decision by the Court of Criminal Appeal, uh, in a case where the accused filed a subpoena on the Commissioner of Police, which is something I'm sure most of our listeners will be familiar with, and, uh, we're faced with the police, um, briefing legal representation, uh, in order to s- effectively have the subpoena set aside to defeat the subpoena.

Now, the subject of whether we should be pressing for disclosure or subpoenaing and whether people should be following my stay before subpoena [laughs] mantra, we'll have to deal with in another episode because it's very complicated.

But here we have a nice, neat kind of summary of where, um, in this case, the district court judge went wrong in, um, agreeing with the Commissioner of Police that the subpoena did not have a legitimate forensic purpose.

Now, um, I would encourage, uh, everybody, as we always do, to read the, uh, judgment in its entirety, but I want to pick out some key parts for you so that you can see that this might be a little bit different to the cases that we might have considered before.

So the Court of Criminal Appeal determined that the district court judge, um, fundamentally mischaracterized the applicant's trial case.

The accused, NR, is charged with possession of child abuse material and says he's not responsible for the location of the material.

The accused's son is charged with sexually assaulting a child.

No, we have an appeal process.

And so unfortunately, the appeal process, my view is that we need to change the appeal process so that instead of a person appealing a district court or Supreme Court sentence, they just lodge an appeal with either the Court of Criminal Appeal or the Supreme Court.

I believe that they should seek leave first to be granted that right to appeal because so many of the appeals are frivolous.

When there is an appeal, that just extends the trauma to the victim.