Day 084 - 07 Feb 95 - Page 13
1 the index file. I keep a separate file of what I call
2 miscellaneous documents of that kind, but it has not got a
3 name. I am not proposing to tell anyone what is in it.
4 The indices might be the place for it to go since
5 Mrs. Brinley-Codd keeps her lavender diary in that file as
6 well as a sort of master guide to who the people are and
7 where the documents are to be found. There was originally,
8 in addition to the handwritten sheets your Lordship has
9 there, a big green one that Mrs. Brinley-Codd did up to the
10 end of the summer term of documents handed in.
11
12 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I do not know where that is. Perhaps at some
13 stage someone could come up and just see if they can
14 identify it in one of my bundles. Yes, Mr. Morris? Leave
15 that for the moment. Come back to it when you have given
16 yourself an opportunity to read Mrs. Brinley-Codd's work.
17
18 MR. MORRIS: There are two reports which we want Civil Evidence
19 Act Notices on, which is the Preston final report on a
20 cluster of cases, Public Health Laboratory Service
21 documents, which we faxed to the CDSC, Communicable
22 Diseases Surveillance Centre, and to the person who
23 prepared it, Dr. Roberta Marshall. They verified it was
24 the final report, the document that we had.
25
26 So, we would like a Civil Evidence Act notice on that, and
27 also on the Oregon 1982 report from America which was sent
28 to us by whatever they are called. It was sent to us by
29 the people that did the report. It was the Federal Disease
30 Control Centre or whatever it was called -- Centre for
31 Communicable Diseases. That is all we have to say on that.
32 They are documents 23 and 25 on the Defendants' second
33 Supplementary List.
34
35 We were checking some of the law in this area because, if
36 it helps the court, Order 27 Rule 4.1 says, we believe,
37 that if a list is served and is not challenged, any
38 document is not challenged by the other party, the document
39 is deemed to be original and authentic. But, in any event,
40 we did contact both those, we got the document directly
41 from -- well, we checked the Preston one with the author to
42 check its authenticity, double check. OK.
43
44 The next point is the counterclaim matter we would like to
45 bring up.
46
47 MS. STEEL: This was the point about Mr. Rampton being able to
48 pick and choose which parts of the leaflet he says are
49 false in relation to the counterclaim. Our application is
50 that the Plaintiffs should be required to plead which parts
51 they are saying are false and then they should be put to
52 proving those parts. Until they do that it is impossible
53 for us to fight the case fairly really without -- we are
54 fighting blind, in effect, because we do not know what the
55 Plaintiffs are saying, which parts they are trying to prove
56 are false and which parts they are not.
57
58 If they are saying that something is not true, they cannot
59 rely on the inference that it has not been proved but it is
60 true.
