"You know something, I hope he has a publisher, I really do. Because you see that lucid imagination it wasn't only concocted by him, you know he had assistance to write that piece of fiction, that novel."
"This however, is not to condone the inaccuracies in the address; they are of great concern to the Court and while care must be taken in preparing one's address, particularly prosecuting counsel, we do not think that given the errors complained of that the fairness of the trial was at risk. Counsel was present at the trial and has expressed his perception of the tone and manner of speech of prosecuting counsel. It may well be that prosecuting counsel was somewhat high spirited in his address and overplayed the dramatics but we think that the trial judge was there to prevent any unfairness and took adequate steps to correct any major errors that might have occurred. Counsel, for example, complained about what could be considered picong meted out to Merle concerning her Yankee accent. Counsel's exposure to local culture may be limited but any jury would have understood the context in which such remarks were made. On another note, to suggest that prosecuting counsel was targeting counsel's British ancestry when he made observations about Arnold's choice of words to describe certain events is to take matters a bit far. The observations did suggest assistance in preparing his evidence but that was merely to show that Arnold could not be considered a reliable witness, particularly given the unusual vocabulary used by him."
"28 While reference has been made above to some of the rules which should be observed in a well-conducted trial to safeguard the fairness of the proceedings, it is not every departure from good practice which renders a trial unfair. Inevitably, in the course of a long trial, things are done or said which should not be done or said. Most occurrences of that kind do not undermine the integrity of the trial, particularly if they are isolated and particularly if, where appropriate, they are the subject of a clear judicial direction. It would emasculate the trial process, and undermine public confidence in the administration of criminal justice, if a standard of perfection were imposed that was incapable of attainment in practice. But the right of a criminal defendant to a fair trial is absolute. There will come a point when the departure from good practice is so gross, or so persistent, or so prejudicial, or so irremediable that an appellate court will have no choice but to condemn a trial as unfair and quash a conviction as unsafe, however strong the grounds for believing the defendant to be guilty. The right to a fair trial is one to be enjoyed by the guilty as well as the innocent, for a defendant is presumed to be innocent until proved to be otherwise in a fairly conducted trial. 29 The crucial issue in the present appeal is whether there were such departures from good practice in the course of the appellant's trial as to deny him the substance of a fair trial. The Board reluctantly concludes that there were. Prosecuting counsel conducted himself as no minister of justice should conduct himself. The trial judge failed to exert the authority vested in him to control the proceedings and enforce proper standards of behaviour. Regrettably, he allowed himself to be overborne and allowed his antipathy to both the appellant and his counsel to be only too manifest. While none of the appellant's complaints taken on its own would support a successful appeal, taken together they leave the Board with no choice but to quash the appellant's convictions. It cannot be sure that the matters of which complaint is made, taken together, did not inhibit the presentation of the defence case and distract the attention of the jury from the crucial issues they had to decide."
"If the defects were relatively minor, the trial may still be regarded as fair. Conversely, if they were sufficiently serious it cannot be accepted as fair, no matter how strong the evidence of guilt."