irrelevant hour. The learned Chief Justice ruled that such evidence was inadmissible.
(1)
This matter was male the subject of one
of the grounds of appeal but we may say at once that we conside" that there was no substance in it. Mr. Sedgwick does not deny that the trend of recent authority in a 1 the common law jurisă ctions, including the Dominions and the United tates of America, is against the admission of such evidence. The reasons why courts are rei ctant to admit such ovidence were onumerated the court in the Now Zealand case R. v. McKay and are con eniently summarised at page 646 of the Criminal Law Review for 1967 in an article on the case of McKay by the senior lecturer in law of Victoria University, Wellington. Those reasons are, first, that evidence of previous statements to establish the consistency of the party either in civil or criminal proceedings is inadmissible; secondly, that such evidence would in any case be hearsay and would not fall within any of the recognised exceptions to the hear ay rule; thirdly, that to admit such evidence in proof of the inn ence of the accused would be to substitute "trial by psychiatrists, for trial by jury"; and fourthly, that in the present state of knowledge respect of such evidence science had not yet provided adequate grantees of the accuracy of the tests involving truth drugs. Notwi: standing some criticists of these four propositions made by the wri'r of that article we are of the opinion that these criticisms are ve id in the present state of knowledge concerning such tests.
It may
of course, conceivably be
. may in the future develop
tained under drugs whic will
11 ultimately be justified
that a body of learned scientific opini concerning the reliability of evidence be of so cogent a nature that the court in creating yet a further exception to the hearsay rule. We do not think that there is any validity in the istinction Mr. Sedgwick sought
to draw between cases where (as in McKay
the accused seeks both to
initiate the creating of this evidence as well as the introduction of it at the trial and cases where, as in te present case, such evidence has been created at the instance of the rosecution. It is not true
to say, as counsel said, that this state ent to Dr. Pang should be regarded as not having been made to a third party because Dr. Pang had taken the statement at the instance f the prosecution. It was a non-confessional statement and was the efore as effectively barred as would any self-serving statement made by the accused to his own practitioner. There is likewise nothing in the suggestion that the
(1) (1967) N.Z.L.R. 139.