ABSTRACT
Clearly, proof of the commission of an earlier offence will be ‘relevant to any issue’ in the current proceedings if it establishes an element of the offence now charged. So, for example, in R v Pigram,29 where two men were charged with handling stolen goods, the plea of guilty made by one of the defendants was held admissible at the trial of the other for the purpose of proving that the goods were stolen. None of the cases decided under the old law that were referred to at the beginning of this section would now be decided in the same way. But the Court of Appeal has held that a wide interpretation should be applied to ‘issue’, so as to allow it to cover not just essential ingredients of an offence, but evidentiary matters also. In R v Castle,30 for example, C and others, including F, were charged with robbery. F pleaded guilty. The victim had picked out C and F at identification parades, saying ‘Yes’ when identifying C and ‘Possibly’ when identifying F. The trial judge admitted evidence of F’s guilty plea under s 74(1) and was upheld by the Court of Appeal, on the basis that the plea of guilty by F was relevant to the reliability of the identification of C, which was the ‘issue’ for the purposes of the subsection. F had, as it were, confirmed an identification made by the victim that had been no more than tentative. If that was correct, then the probability was that the more certain identification of C was correct also.
