International Law

R. v. Stirling (SCC)

In a brief decision the Supreme Court upholds the B. C. Court of Appeal’s ruling in R. v. Stirling. No surprise to readers of this blog. The case dealt with the use that prior consistent statements can be put, and the fine line between rebutting an allegation of recent fabrication and supporting a witness’s credibility. As I said in my earlier comment:

It is a fine line indeed. And while I can appreciate it in theory, I?m not sure it?s always possible to draw it in practice. In the present case the trial judge seems to have written a very careful judgment, but there was a clear implication that his finding of ?consistency? between the various statements made by Mr. Harding was being used as corroboration. However, given the ambiguity in the language, the grayness between confirmation and corroboration, it?s pretty hard to pull reversible error out of the mix.

Or, as the Supreme Court have it:

It is . . . not entirely accurate to submit, as the appellant contends, that prior consistent statements cannot be used to ?bolster? or ?support? the credibility of a witness generally. This argument attempts to insulate the impact of the prior consistent statements from the remainder of the credibility analysis and suggests that ?general? credibility can somehow be hived off from the specific credibility question to which the statements relate. Such a fine parsing of the notion of credibility is impractical and artificial.

Full post as published by Criminal Review on March 14, 2008 (boomark / email).