Where an offender's untreated mental illness (such as schizophrenia with persecutory delusions) causes them to refuse to authorise their lawyers to access medical records prior to sentencing, those records may be admitted as fresh evidence on a sentence appeal. The refusal is not a deliberate forensic choice. Evidence that a schizophrenic offender was repeatedly assaulted in custody, consistent with the victimisation of mentally ill inmates, is capable of displacing a sentencing judge's finding that custody would not weigh more heavily on the offender.
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