The Mushroom Cook - The Appeal | The seven grounds

Yeah.

So we'll go through this one by one to just try and make it as easy for our listeners to understand as possible, 'cause like I said, it, it did get pretty dense at times today.

And I might refer to my notes at times as well, just because we want to make sure that we're accurately reporting, um, the arguments made today by the lawyers.

So the first ground was the one we actually touched on in our last episode about the hotel and the sequestering of the jury.

So just as a quick reminder, during the deliberations, the jury were sequestered at a hotel, which meant once they were done for the day with their deliberations at court, they were bussed over to the hotel to all be together, have dinner, unwind, and then they'd head to bed, get ready for deliberations the next day.

There were jury keepers who swore an oath as well to oversee this process.

They were there to pretty much make sure that no people were talking or interacting with the jurors during that whole process.

So from being bussed to the hotel to when they were at the hotel, they pretty much had to be in isolation.

That meant they were eating their meals in a hotel conference room.

They weren't allowed in the restaurant area.

So we're getting a bit of an insight today into what that process was like.

But at the crux of this ground of appeal is that it came to light that the lead investigator, Detective Eppingstall, and then two prosecution lawyers were at that same hotel over that period of time.

For Detective Eppingstall, he was actually there pretty much the whole time they were there.

Where the prosecution lawyers, they checked in on the Friday, I believe, and the jury had left by the Saturday.

But in the words used today by, um, Richard Edney, so again, this is Erin's lead defense barrister now, he would describe what happened as catastrophic.

That was the word he used today.

And he said justice should not only be done, but it should be seen to be done.

And that's a really important legal maxim that has been around for more than 100 years, that it's not just about what actually happens, it's about the perception around it.

But then there was some questions that he started getting peppered with by the, the judges, and this happened pretty quickly, actually.

He wasn't too far into his arguments when they had some, you know, they wanted some answers from him.

They asked him whether there was any evidence that the jury was not under supervision during this period of time.

They wanted to know, for example, was there a period of time where the jury keepers just sort of wandered off and the, the jurors were left there on their own.

But the defense said there wasn't really any evidence of that kind.

No CCTV footage was taken from the hotel for them to run that sort of analysis.

And then one of the judges, uh, Justice Kidd, he made a really good point about the way trials are run in Melbourne typically.