As the Attorney General had a statutory responsibility to personally consider whether sentences should be referred to the Court of Appeal as unduly lenient, it was inimical to the public interest for judges, when exercising their discretion as to the provision of a transcript of a sentence hearing, to restrict or limit the provision of […]
Although a judge had unnecessarily and improperly intervened during a defendant’s examination-in-chief, the interventions were not so significant as to materially impair the defendant’s ability to put his case before the jury. The judge’s interventions, combined with deficiencies in his summing-up, had not deprived the defendant of a fair trial.
Although a judge’s summing up had been defective, in that he had recited large chunks of evidence rather than summarising the defence and prosecution cases, that had not affected the safety of a conviction for sexual assault, it did not deflect the jury from a proper and fair consideration of the issues.
