The main object of this Bill is to abolish the present procedure for the preliminary examination of indictable offences and to substitute for it a procedure which will, I expect, result in the virtual abolition of the taking of depositions. There are other provisions in the Bill, such as those dealing with remand in Part III and the miscellaneous amendments in Part IV, but they are subordinate to this main object.
Under our system of criminal procedure, and that of most other countries, there is provision for a preliminary investigation by a judicial officer of the case against a person accused of a serious crime. That officer has power to decide whether or not the case disclosed by the prosecutor is sufficient to justify putting the accused person on trial. For a very long time now our procedure has been that this investigation is carried out before a district justice and all the evidence has to be written out by the district court clerk in longhand. The written deposition is read over to each witness after his evidence has been taken and, finally, all the depositions are read over to the accused at the conclusion of the evidence for the prosecution. The district justice then considers any statement the accused himself may make on being cautioned, and finally decides whether or not the prosecution has established a sufficient case to justify putting the accused on trial.
It is hardly necessary to say that this can be a most tedious and expensive procedure. It takes up to some 600 days a year of the time of district justices, not to speak of the time, expense and inconvenience of the other persons concerned in the proceedings. Although it has the advantage from the accused's point of view that the depositions provide an indication of the prosecution case which the present system does not otherwise give him, he has to undergo a distressing period in court even when, in fact, there is no doubt that the evidence against him is more than adequate to justify his being sent forward for trial.
Experience shows that very few accused persons disclose their defence at this stage or bring forward any witnesses on their behalf. Only about one per cent of persons arrested or summoned for indictable offences are discharged at this point of the proceedings.
To obviate what everybody agrees is an undesirable situation I am proposing in this Bill that, whenever an accused person is brought before the District Court charged with an indictable offence, he is to be supplied with a complete statement of the prosecution case before the commencement of the preliminary examination. The accused is also being entitled to waive the preliminary examination. He may still consent, as he can under the present law, to be tried summarily by the district justice in certain circumstances; or he may plead guilty and be sentenced there and then by the District Court or be sent forward for sentence by the Circuit Criminal Court. In deference to views expressed during the passage of the Bill through the Dáil, I have preserved the absolute right of the prosecutor or the accused to require evidence to be given on sworn deposition.
Previous experience suggests that the deposition procedure will in future be availed of very sparingly, so that the proposed new procedure should be of considerable benefit to all concerned. From the point of view of the State, although local State Solicitors will have the task of preparing statements of the evidence to be given at the trial on the basis of the statements made to the garda, there will be a substantial saving in the time spent in the District Court on the preliminary investigation. This saving of time and expence applies to everybody concerned in the proceedings, including witnesses. From the point of view of the accused, he not only retains his present right to have evidence taken on deposition but he will know, in advance of the preliminary examination, what exactly the prosecution evidence will amount to. He is also saved the distress involved in prolonged attendances for taking unnecessary depositions. He has these advantages in addition to those inherent in the present procedure, that is, he may require the evidence that is to be given against him to be given on oath and he may test it in cross-examination and possibly succeed in satisfying the district justice that no prima facie case has been made out against him. He has also the further advantage, to which I will refer again in a moment, that the case against him at this preliminary stage may not be published unless he himself desires it and, even then, the district justice has discretion to refuse his application for publication.
On the whole, therefore, I think I can fairly claim that the Bill represents a reasonable balance between the necessity for modernising the present procedure and ensuring at the same time that the rights of accused persons are fully preserved.
On the question of publication of the proceedings at the preliminary examination, the Bill provides that, unless the accused person requires publication, no one may publish any information about the proceedings other than a statement of the fact that they have been held in relation to a named person on a specified charge and also, of course, a statement of the decision of the district justice at the conclusion of the examination. Provision is made in subsection (3) of section 17 that this prohibition will not apply to the publication of such information as the justice permits to be published at the request of the accused. Side by side with this prohibition on publication, which goes further than the existing restrictions on publication contained in the Criminal Justice Act, 1951, there is a re-affirmation, in section 16, of the provision that a preliminary examination must be in open court. There will still be cases, however, where the court will have power to exclude the public where this is desirable in the interests of justice or required by any enactment. Apart from cases, such as incest cases which must be held in camera this power of the District Court to exclude persons from the court room will not apply to press representatives or to certain other persons such as parents or friends or an accused person who, under the present law, have a right to be present.
Here again, I think the provisions of the Bill are such as will command a good deal of general support. As I mentioned in the Dáil, I am gratified to learn that our journalists individually, and the Press as a whole, were overwhelmingly in favour of non-publication of the preliminary proceedings for the reason that publication might be prejudicial to the fair trial of the accused. This was also the unanimous view of the Committee on Court Practice and Procedure, under the chairmanship of Mr. Justice Brian Walsh, on whose First Interim Report Part II of this Bill has largely been based. I should like to pay tribute here to the work of this Committee, not only as represented by that particular Report, but also by the various other reports which have been received from them on other aspects of court practice and procedure and which are now under examination.
The opportunity presented by the promotion of this Bill has been availed of to make a number of other amendments in criminal law and procedure. For example, section 19 amends the list of indictable offences which may be tried summarily by removing the monetary value of stolen property which may be dealt with summarily and adding a number of other indictable offences to the list of those which may be dealt with in this way. The consent of the Attorney General will be required in larceny cases where the value of the property exceeds £200.
In Part III of the Bill, which contains a number of provisions dealing with the remand of accused persons, provision is made to allow the District Court, if the accused and the prosecutor consent, to remand an accused person in custody for a period of more than eight days but not exceeding thirty days. Eight days is the present maximum limit. The object is to avoid the necessity for having to bring the accused before the court at frequent intervals when there is no prospect of the prosecution being able to proceed with the preliminary examination. The present limit will continue to apply when the accused is first remanded, because it is reasonable to assume that the accused may not at that stage fully appreciate what is in his own best interests.
Also in Part III, there is a provision —in section 28—allowing information to be given regarding the fact that a person is already on bail in connection with another offence or regarding previous convictions for offences committed while on bail, subject to certain safeguards. Part IV was added to the Bill in the course of its passage through the Dáil and contains mainly amendments of the Extradition Act, 1965, which are designed to remove some minor difficulties of a technical nature which have arisen in its operation. There is also in that Part section 34, which enables the Attorney General to get a final determination from the Supreme Court of what the law is in a case where a trial judge has directed the jury to return a verdict in favour of the accused person on a question of law. The decision of the Supreme Court will be without prejudice to the verdict in favour of the accused person.
In conclusion, I should like to thank the various people, and there are many of them, who have communicated views and suggestions for the improvement of the Bill since it was first published. In such a radical reform of existing procedures as this Bill contemplates, it is only reasonable that there should be concern to see that the new procedure will be as good as we can possibly make it. One of the problems in a Bill of this kind is to try to decide what should be left to be regulated by the Act and what to be settled by rules of court. Ideally, the Act should concern itself only with a bare statement of the fundamental principles involved and the rules with detailed implementation of these principles.
The District Court Rules Committee have been working on rules to take account of the new procedure contemplated by this Bill and they expect to submit a draft of the revised rules to me shortly. In this way, I hope that the new procedure for preliminary examination will come into operation very soon after the enactment of the Bill. There is no need to hold up the commencement of the provisions of Part IV which, as I have said, deal mainly with amendments of the Extradition Act, 1965, and these will come into operation immediately the Bill becomes law.
Although the Bill has been amended and improved during its passage through the Dáil, I have little doubt, from my previous experience in the Seanad with Bills of this nature, that it will get a very careful examination here also and that constructive proposals for its further improvement will be forthcoming. May I say in advance that I shall welcome them very much and give them sympathetic consideration?