Where a Crown witness recants prior police statements at a judge-alone trial and the real issue is the truthfulness of the prior accounts (not reliability in the sense of mistaken identification or confusion), the trial judge's focus on credibility rather than reliability is not erroneous. The rule in Browne v Dunn does not require formulaic propositions to be put to a witness before a trial judge can make adverse findings that clearly arise from the Crown case. The purpose of s 38 cross-examination includes enabling the Crown to demonstrate that prior inconsistent statements are true.
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