ABSTRACT
Judges in the past attempted to control the way in which juries thought about kinds of evidence that were regarded as particularly unreliable. Early informal rules of practice later developed into formal rules of law about directions that should be given during a summing up. One of these sets of rules came to be known as the law relating to ‘corroboration’ which required juries to be warned about the danger of convicting on the ‘uncorroborated’ evidence of a witness in three types of case: where the witness was an accomplice, a child, or a complainant in a case where a sexual crime was alleged. The law of corroboration has now been very largely abolished by s 34(2) of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 (in relation to the evidence of children) and s 32 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (in relation to evidence of accomplices and of complainants in sexual cases). The effect of these sections was stated by the Court of Appeal in R v Makanjuola (1995) to be that trial judges now have a wide discretion to adapt warnings about the testimony of any witness to the circumstances of the case. But for a warning to be given, there must be some evidential basis for suggesting that the witness’ testimony may be unreliable.
