Judgments to be delivered in the High Court of Australia

Next week the High Court will deliver judgment in two reserved cases.

The first judgment will be delivered on Wednesday, 18 April 2012 in the case of Aytugrul v The Queen.  At issue is the manner in which statistical evidence relating to DNA samples found at the crime scene were presented to the jury.  Two different formulations were adopted: a random occurrence percentage (ie the frequency with which a particular DNA profile is expected to occur in a population – one in every X persons); and an exclusion percentage (ie the proportion of people in that same population who would not be expected to have that same DNA profile).  The appellant argues that the DNA evidence expressed as exclusion percentages, being expressed as percentages of close to 100%, were unfairly prejudicial and should have been rejected.

The second judgment will be delivered on Friday, 20 April 2012 in the case of Roadshow Films Pty Ltd v iiNet Ltd, which addresses the issue of the extent to which an internet service provider may be liable for breach of copyright by its customers using BitTorrent, on the basis that it has “authorised” those copyright infringements.

As always, the case names link to the High Court's webpage, where details of the case and the written submissions can be downloaded.