Compliance with Police Commissioner's directives for interviewing children and Aboriginal persons is not conclusive of admissibility; the court retains an independent discretion to exclude confessional evidence by reference to all the circumstances. Where the critical admission precedes an alleged police misrepresentation, the misrepresentation does not retrospectively taint the earlier admission. On causation in manslaughter, a jury may apply common sense to factual evidence and is not required to accept competing medical hypotheses that are inconsistent with the observed sequence of events. Where the Crown prosecutor at trial concedes a non-custodial sentence is appropriate, the Attorney-General's appeal against sentence will not succeed.
The full text is available to signed-in members, including the 3 later cases that cite this judgment.