Day 072 - 12 Jan 95 - Page 32


     
     1
     2   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  You see, there is nothing one can do about
     3        that.  If I am right about the law, that is it, and I have
     4        to abide by the law of evidence in this country.  I cannot
     5        make exceptions, because let us suppose I wanted to avoid
     6        the calling of someone like Mr. Taylor because I thought:
     7         "Oh, well, I will accept what he has written in his
     8        letter", I just cannot do that.  If you say what someone
     9        has written demonstrates what they believe, you are making
    10        the assumption that they have written in good faith.
    11
    12   MS. STEEL:   I am sure that there have been documents which the
    13        Plaintiffs have referred to where they have asserted that
    14        that shows what someone thinks.  I have difficulty
    15        remembering a particular example except I think there was
    16        one when Ms. Dibb was questioned.
    17
    18   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  I think you should overnight try to think of
    19        that because unless there was some special circumstance
    20        (and I cannot recall it at the moment), I would not myself
    21        think that that was right.  It is a very short step then to
    22        saying that they could only believe it was true since it
    23        relates to something as concrete as environment/index.html">litter lying around,
    24        because they believe it to be true, it is true, do you
    25        see?  I cannot take that step.  I think you should think
    26        about it.  The reason I have raised it now is that I would
    27        not want you to proceed through the case and then, at the
    28        end of the day, say:  "Look, Mr. Taylor wrote that,
    29        therefore, you should accept that what he wrote is true,
    30        even that he believed what he wrote was true".
    31
    32        We will break off there, if you like.  You see, you have
    33        one witness on this, Mr. McIntyre, and the last thing
    34        I want you to do is start calling lots and lots of
    35        witnesses.  But if you are going to ask me to say that in
    36        September 1993, whatever McDonald's witnesses say about the
    37        system of environment/index.html">litter patrol, it had broken down and was not in
    38        operation then, at the moment I am disposed to feel that
    39        you are going to have to put more than Mr. Taylor's letter
    40        in front of me.
    41
    42        Give it a little bit of thought and take some advice on it,
    43        if you wish.  You have the advantage that when I say things
    44        like this they immediately go on to Case View.  It may not
    45        be word perfect but it is pretty near it in this instance
    46        and certainly readily understandable, I hope, so you can
    47        take your machine home.  If you have somebody that is
    48        helping, you can just flash up January 12th, page 33; just
    49        as, for instance, when I said to you and Mr. Morris in
    50        argument earlier this morning what I thought we had to keep 
    51        our eye on was the ball in the case, and he was minded to 
    52        agree, that was page 10, line 52 to page 11, line 6.  If 
    53        I do make comments like this (which I hope you will accept
    54        are designed to help, not to stall you) just write down the
    55        Case View page on a bit of paper so you can ask someone
    56        else:  "Well, has the Judge got that right or not?".
    57
    58   MS. STEEL:  Before we leave, could the witness be reminded not
    59        to speak to anybody from the company?
    60

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