Day 165 - 27 Sep 95 - Page 13
1 to make discovery in an action oppressive and
2 time-consuming if the obligation was to provide material
3 for cross-examination as to creditworthiness which, I must
4 say, I had interpreted as meaning reliability generally of
5 the evidence to the extent to which the judge could credit
6 it.
7
8 MS. STEEL: I will come back to that, but I just wanted to say
9 that the Plaintiffs have not blanked out some completely
10 irrelevant parts which have obviously been left in for the
11 purposes of discrediting both London Greenpeace or us.
12 I just think that on the grounds of fairness the reverse
13 should apply; they should not be allowed to blank out parts
14 which may enable us to attack the credibility of the
15 witness.
16
17 I will just go through the notes I made along the side of
18 the Thorpe case. In the paragraphs that Mr. Rampton
19 referred to, page 665, letter F, it refers to: "... there
20 were relevant limitations to the general rule in that the
21 court would not order discovery which was directed solely
22 to cross-examination as to credit or to evidence of the
23 existence of similar facts where those similar facts had no
24 material bearing on the issues to be decided in the action
25 but were merely prejudicial as showing instances of similar
26 conduct in other situations".
27
28 Obviously, that is talking about other situations. Here we
29 are talking about notes made of a meeting and it is the
30 events of the meeting which are in dispute. It is not the
31 case of introducing prejudice as to the witness's nature;
32 it is a case of testing the strength of the notes that have
33 been taken by the witness which form the basis of the
34 evidence being given.
35
36 I would say there is a vast difference between a list of
37 previous convictions which are about other instances and
38 notes which relate to the self-same meeting about which the
39 witness is giving evidence. It does say: "... where those
40 similar facts had no material bearing on the issues to be
41 decided in the action", obviously we would argue that they
42 do have a material bearing because it is about the
43 activities of the group and the participants and the
44 activities of the participants in the meetings.
45
46 It occurred to me while I was reading this case that
47 I would have thought it would be inconceivable that in a
48 criminal case a Police Officer would be allowed to blank
49 out certain parts of his notebook relating to what took
50 place at an event that the Officer was giving evidence
51 about.
52
53 I can just refer to page 667 of the Thorpe case? This is
54 not the subject of the appeal, but it does say just below
55 paragraph F -----
56
57 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I do not have that so just read it out.
58
59 MS. STEEL: It says: "There was an application by the
60 plaintiff's solicitors for further discovery. That came
