Day 072 - 12 Jan 95 - Page 32
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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.
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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.
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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".
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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.
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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?".
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58 MS. STEEL: Before we leave, could the witness be reminded not
59 to speak to anybody from the company?
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