Where post-trial psychiatric evidence raises a real and substantial question about an accused's fitness to plead, the appellate court is obliged to allow the appeal as a miscarriage of justice, even where the evidence at trial was sufficient to support the conviction and the issue was not raised below. The appellant's obsessive focus on an irrelevant legal argument (Attorney-General's consent) to the exclusion of the elements of the offence was treated as illustrative of the psychiatric incapacity identified by the post-trial report.
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