The District Court dismissed the application to adduce fresh evidence and confirmed the convictions and sentences for fraud offences under s 192E Crimes Act involving subletting of public housing and intentional deception of the NSW Land and Housing Corporation. The Court held that none of the proposed fresh evidence — including digital forensic reports, psychological reports, a competing document examiner's report, and translation evidence — met the 'interests of justice' threshold under s 18(2) of the Crimes (Appeal and Review) Act 2001, principally because the evidence suffered from inherent limitations (unknown chain of custody, reliance on unverified instructions from the appellants, failure to provide original devices for testing despite repeated requests), was available or obtainable during the Local Court hearing where the appellants were legally represented, and the public interest in finality of litigation weighed against admission. The Court independently reviewed the evidence and endorsed the Magistrate's findings that the appellants had fabricated documents tendered at trial, based on the forensic document examiner's unchallenged conclusion that handwriting on disputed exhibits was an identical copy of originals in the Corporation's system — something that is not humanly possible unless one document was copied from the other.
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