The Court held that the general rule favouring joint trial of co-accused charged with committing a crime jointly was not displaced where each accused blamed the other for inflicting fatal stab wounds. Out-of-court statements by a co-accused implicating the applicant, though prejudicial, could be adequately addressed by careful judicial directions to the jury, particularly where the evidence against each accused was not significantly different in strength and the risk of inconsistent verdicts from separate trials was real. The application for separate trials under s 624 of the Criminal Code (WA) was dismissed.
The full text is available to signed-in members, including the 3 later cases that cite this judgment.