Section 20(2) of the Foreign Evidence Act 1994 (Cth) is constitutionally valid and authorises State courts to admit foreign evidence in criminal proceedings for State offences. A trial judge is not required to give an accomplice-type warning in respect of business records where the maker is unreliable, provided the jury is capable of understanding the basis for the unreliability. In complex multi-count fraud trials, the adequacy of the charge must be assessed as a whole, not by fine scrutiny of individual passages. For sentencing in systematic corporate fraud cases, cumulation of sentences must not produce a total effective sentence that is crushing, particularly for older first offenders.
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