Knight & Ors v The Queen

The appellants appealed against an order of a judge dismissing their application for orders pursuant to s 70(7) of the Jury Act 1995 that there be an investigation of suspected bias or the commissions of an offence relating to the jury that returned guilty verdicts against the appellants and seeking the disclosure of jury information for the purposes of that investigation.

The circumstances giving rise to the application arose from a conversation between an officer of Legal Aid Queensland, who had acted for one of the appellants, and his barber. That conversation involved relaying a prior conversation between the barber and a member of the jury which, on the appellants’ case, raised two possibilities; namely, that information concerning the appellants’ prior criminal histories was obtained prior to verdict or after verdict such as to give rise to “grounds to suspect that a person may have been guilty of bias, fraud or an offence” within the meaning of s 70(7). The phrase “grounds to suspect” was considered in George v Rockett (1990) 170 CLR 104, to which the primary judge referred, in which the High Court held that, “The facts which can reasonably ground a suspicion may be quite insufficient reasonably to ground a belief, yet some factual basis for the suspicion must be shown”.

The Court of Appeal rejected the appellants’ contention that the possibilities that the jury found out about the prior convictions before the verdicts, on the one hand, or after the verdicts, on the other, were equally open. There was nothing in the relevant conversation that suggested that the juror’s knowledge of the appellants’ prior criminal offences was gained before delivery of the jury’s verdicts. Nor was there anything in the conversation to suggest that the juror was not alive to, or unmindful of, his obligations as a juror. Further, the Court referred to the “fundamental assumption” that a jury in a criminal trial, “acted … on the evidence and in accordance with the trial judge’s directions” (Gilbert v The Queen (2000) 201 CLR 414, 426).

may have been guilty of bias, fraud or of an offence …”, the section is not triggered unless there are “grounds to suspect”. The Court held that, in this case, there was the mere possibility that the juror obtained the relevant knowledge prior to the verdicts. On the other hand, there were cogent reasons for believing that the relevant knowledge was gained after the verdicts. In such circumstances there was no basis for concluding that this possibility amounted