A STATUTORY FORMULA FOR THE ADMISSION OF SIMILAR FACT EVIDENCE AGAINST A CRIMINAL ACCUSED

The law governing the admission, against a criminal accused, of what is referred to – sometimes inaccurately- as “similar fact evidence ” has been allowed to acquire a complexity which is not wholly justified. This complexity has arisen as the result of two errors which have operated in tandem for the best part of two centuries. The first is to regard all instances in which a criminal accused’s additional (usually prior) misdeeds are disclosed to a court as “similar fact evidence”, when in fact many such disclosures involve facts which are far from similar. The second has been the attempt to rationalise and regulate the law on such disclosure along the lines of the purpose for which it is admitted, when in fact it is best approached from the standpoint of its natural relevance to the case as a whole. This thesis corrects the first misconception, and identifies what is herein described as “similar fact evidence properly so called”. It then proceeds to a critical examination of the historical treatment, by common law courts around the world, of additional misdeeds of a criminal accused, and argues that the current state of confusio