Day 043 - 01 Nov 94 - Page 80
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2 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Could you copy it so that Ms. Steel and
3 Mr. Morris for the moment, anyway, have one copy between
4 them? It is quite a long transcript and most of it is
5 irrelevant to the point. It is about the issues of the
6 operation which went wrong. I hope it turns out not to be
7 a fundamental matter. You might like to look at it. What
8 I will do is I will have two extra copies made, keep one
9 myself, give one to you for your side and if you do not
10 mind sharing.
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12 MR. MORRIS: Maybe we can have the relevant pages.
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14 MR. JUSTICE BELL: No, you can have the lot, so that you are not
15 missing anything. You can copy any parts of it which you
16 want.
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18 MR. RAMPTON: My Lord, may I say this: I have thus far --
19 I hope your Lordship may think -- taken a very relaxed
20 attitude to the admissibility of evidence in all its form,
21 mostly because this is not a jury action, so it does not
22 really matter very much. Whether at the end of the day
23 your Lordship attaches any weight at all to inadmissible
24 evidence is another question. The furthest I have gone so
25 far is to ask for a Civil Evidence Act notice in relation
26 to the lady who did the Grazing in Peckham survey. That is
27 as far as I have gone. It is not really the admissibility
28 of the documents that I was raising at all in relation to
29 Miss Dibb's material. It was the fact that Mr. Hawkes
30 would not have a chance to get ready to deal with them.
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32 MR. JUSTICE BELL: All I can say at the moment is if either side
33 thinks at the end of the day in relation to any survey or
34 outside paper they are going to take a strict point of law
35 saying it is not admissible at all and I cannot take it
36 into account, I think they should say so, so we do not
37 suddenly arrive at the end of the case and find that that
38 is the stand. Weight is another matter. How much weight
39 is attached to it is a matter of argument. What I do not
40 want to do is to find at the very end of the case someone
41 is saying, "You cannot take that into account at all", and
42 the other party find out that that is the stand which was
43 taken for the first time during final speeches.
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45 Thank you.
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47 (The court adjourned until the following day)
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