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2 Current Issues Crim. Just. 19 (1990-1991)
The Benefits of Committal Proceedings

handle is hein.journals/cicj2 and id is 143 raw text is: THE BENEFITS OF COMMITTAL PROCEEDINGS PJ. Hidden, QCI Senior Public Defender In a paper entitled In Defence of the Committal for Trial delivered at the Second International Criminal Law Congress at Surfers Paradise in 1988, Mr Justice J.A. Lee, the Chief Judge of the Common Law Division of our Supreme Court, wrote: Speaking for myself, I cannot feel other than that the preliminary investigation provided by committal is a protection to an accused against wrongful prosecution of the same order as is the requirement at the trial that the charge against him be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Putting altogether to one side the advantages which the accused himself may gain from the committal for use by him in the subsequent trial, there remains the fundamental feature that the committal ensures that a person is not put on trial unless it has been shown publicly that there is a prima facie case against him. The modem Australian apologist of the committal system draws comfort from a variety of authoritative statements, chief among them being the resounding words of Gibbs ACJ and Mason J (as they were then) in Barton v. The Queen: 2 It is now accepted in England and Australia that committal proceedings are an important element in our system of criminal justice. They constitute such an important element in the protection of the accused that a trial held without antecedent committal proceedings, unless justified on strong and powerful grounds, must necessarily be considered unfair. For us to say, as has been suggested, that the courts are concerned only with the conduct of the trial itself, considered quite independently of the committal proceedings, would be to turn our backs on the development of the criminal process and to ignore the function of the preliminary examination and its relationship to the trial. To deny an accused the benefit of committal proceedings is to deprive him of a valuable protection uniformly available to other accused person, which is of great advantage to him, whether in terminating the proceedings before trial or at the trial. With their Honours' reasons Aickin J agreed. The other three Justices (Stephen, Murphy and Wilson JJ) did not see committal proceedings as an essential pre-requisite of a fair trial, although none of them denied their benefit to, at least, the accused. For example, Stephen J referred to the effects of the absence of committal proceedings before trial as follows:3 ... loss by the accused of the chance of discharge by the committing magistrate is by no means the most serious detriment which absence of committal proceedings imposes upon an accused. 1 Paper delivered at a public seminar entitled Committal for Trial and Pre-Trial Disclosure, convened by the Institute of Criminology, The University of Sydney, 11 April 1990 2 (1980) 147 CLR 75, at 100 3 ibid at 105

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