Leave to appeal against conviction was refused on both proposed grounds. The Court held that the circumstantial evidence — particularly mobile phone location data showing both phones travelling together from Mildura to the Paschendale area and back, combined with the applicant's prior knowledge of the firearms' location, eyewitness sightings of a matching vehicle with stolen goods, and recovery of stolen items in the Mildura area — was sufficient to support the jury's guilty verdicts and did not require the jury to entertain a reasonable doubt. On the coincidence direction ground, the Court confirmed that the coincidence rule in s 98 of the Evidence Act 2008 is not engaged merely because a circumstantial case involves multiple pieces of evidence that, taken together, the jury concludes are not coincidental; the rule applies only where similarities between two or more events are relied upon to prove a fact or state of mind on the basis of improbability of coincidence.
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