Post-offence conduct including lies, concealment of a body, and sustained deception of family members is not intractably neutral as between murder and manslaughter where the lengths of concealment go beyond what would be expected from consciousness of guilt of an unintended killing. Where defence counsel makes a rational forensic decision not to seek a direction distinguishing between uses of consciousness of guilt evidence for murder versus manslaughter, no miscarriage of justice arises. Proof of intention to kill or cause really serious injury does not require a circumstantial evidence direction on reasonable hypotheses; the binary alternative (absence of intention) is self-evident to the jury.
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