CRIMINAL DIVISION
Strand London, WC2A 2LL |
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B e f o r e :
(LORD JUSTICE HUGHES)
MR JUSTICE FIELD
MR JUSTICE BEATSON
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R E G I N A | ||
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PETER BRUCE LEE |
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Miss T Salako appeared on behalf of the Crown
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"How [A] reacted to the defendant's behaviour to her is an important part of this evidence and it is necessary for the jury to be able to know about this in order to be able to understand why events moved on in the way that they did and in particular to address the delay in allegations being made over a number of years. The evidence about the camcorder in the bathroom explains why she left home and would only go back for visits and helps, in my view, to inform the jury what was going on in the intervening years after the alleged last assault against her when she was 14; something that the jury could well ask about in the absence of any evidence concerning that period."
All those observations may well be true, but none of them makes the evidence evidence without which the other evidence in the case could not properly be understood. To say that evidence fills out the picture is not the same as saying that the rest of the picture is either impossible or difficult to see without it. On the facts of this case the rest of the evidence was not difficult to see without it. Moreover, it was not accurate to say that the bathroom incident was the trigger for A leaving home because it was not; she had left home for a different reason some little time afterwards.