The rules that determine what a criminal court may hear — from hearsay and confessions to bad character — and the safeguards that police the line between proof and prejudice.
A criminal trial turns as much on what the jury never hears as on what it does. This chapter starts with the basic requirements for admissibility, the division of labour between judge and jury, and the section 78 discretion to exclude unfair evidence. It then works through the hearsay rule and its statutory routes to admission — unavailable witnesses, business documents, previous statements, res gestae and the interests of justice gateway — before turning to confessions and the mandatory grounds of oppression and unreliability on which they fall. The closing sections cover Turnbull directions for disputed identification, the seven gateways for admitting a defendant's bad character, and the rules on expert and lay opinion alongside the competence and compellability of witnesses.
