The Gazette 1987

GAZETTE

MARCH 1 987

ALIBI NOTICES

The concept of the Alibi Not i ce is a new one in Irish jur i sprudence, t hough as w i t h many other such novelties it has been bo r r owed f r om legislation in the U.K. It was in- t roduced into our l aw by the Cr iminal Just i ce Act 1 9 8 4 . The aim of this Act was to revolutionize the Criminal Law in Ireland.

others on the following Friday. It was held that the accused could adduce evidence in support of an alibi for the Friday despite the fact that notice had not ben given to the prosecution. Similarly in R. -v- Hassan 3 the accused had been charged that " . . . on dates bet- ween July and August 1968 in Cardiff he lived off the earnings of a prostitute". Part of the Crown case was that the police had seen him in the prostitute's house on a particular day. At his trial the ac- cused had attempted to adduce alibi evidence in relation to that specific day. The trial judge refused to allow him to do so on the grounds that the requisite notice had not been. served. It was held by the Courts of Appeal however, that as the of- fence charged was a continuing one, related to no particular location other than Cardiff, his proffered evid- ence was not caught by the section. The prescribed time limits for service of the Notice of Alibi is set

By virtue of Statutory Instrument No. 1 7/85 part of the Act came in- to operation on the 1st March 1985. We are now told that the re- mainder of the Act will come into force at the beginning of 1987. It is interesting therefore to examine one section of the Act which has been in operation since March 1985 and perhaps from that ex- amination obtain pointers as to how the balance of the Act may af- fect the operation of the Criminal Law in the future. The provisions in relation to Alibi Notices are contained in section 20 of the 1 984 Act. The effect of this section is that in trials on indict- ment an accused person cannot re- ly on an alibi unless he has given the prosecution "Notice of Par- ticulars" of that alibi within the prescribed time. The first point to note is that the new procedure only applies to trials on indictment and therefore does not apply to trials in the District Court. Secondly whereas the word alibi is not defined in the Act, sec- tion 20 subsection 8 does define what is meant by "evidence in sup- port of an alibi". It means evidence tending to show that by reason of the presence of the accused at a particular area at a particular time he was not, or was unlikely to have been at the place where the of- fence was committed at the time of its commission. There is to date no Irish case law interpreting this definition. The United Kingdom cases, however, have strictly con- strued the similar definition in their equivalent section. 1 In the United Kingdom Notice need only be given of alibis in relation to the place and time of the commission of the of- fence. It is not necessary therefore to give notice relating to dates and

places unconcerned with the actual commission of the crime even though it may be a strong part of the prosecution case that the ac- cused was at a certain place at a certain time. Examples from U.K. case law will make this point

by Michael J. Staines (BCL, LLM), Solicitor

clearer. In R. -v- Lewis 2 the accus- ed was charged with receiving cer- tain postal orders on a Wednesday. It was part of the prosecution case that the accused was in the vicini- ty of a Post Office when similar stolen orders were cashed by

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