The Court dismissed an application for leave to appeal a conviction following a guilty plea under s 12 of the Crimes (Appeal and Review) Act. Applying Toro-Martinez [2000] NSWCCA 216, the Court held that where an accused pleads guilty after an adverse evidentiary ruling (here, on the legality of a LEPRA s 36 vehicle search), leave to appeal will not be granted absent evidence that the plea was not attributable to a genuine consciousness of guilt or that there is a real question about the accused's guilt — it is insufficient to show merely that the accused would not have been found guilty had the evidence been excluded. The Court noted, without deciding, that the argument that the police officer lacked reasonable grounds for suspicion under s 36(1)(e) LEPRA was 'not without merit', but this did not overcome the Toro-Martinez threshold for leave.
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