Address on the Retirement of the Honourable James Wood AO
ADDRESS ON THE RETIREMENT OF
THE HONOURABLE JAMES WOOD AO
BY THE HONOURABLE J J SPIGELMAN AC
CHIEF JUSTICE OF NEW SOUTH WALES
SYDNEY , 31 AUGUST 2005
We gather here today to mark the retirement of the Honourable James Wood AO, one of the most highly respected, and most widely respected, judges in the history of this Court. Over a period of 21 years as a judge of this Court, as a Royal Commissioner and as Chief Judge at Common Law, the contribution that your Honour has made to the administration of justice in this State represents a level of public service that few can hope to equal and none surpass.
Your contribution has not only been that of a judge, but that of a judicial leader. Your legal learning, intelligence, judgment, courage, humanity, keen sense of justice, fundamental decency and straight forward style have combined to enable you to show leadership by example, with the result that the role appears to be effortless. Your colleagues have instinctively accepted your leadership without question. There has never been an occasion since my own appointment as Chief Justice over seven years ago, when I was not able to rely completely on your Honour’s advice, judgment and competence. I could not have wished for a better colleague.
There is in the law a certain snobbishness which accords higher status and significance to technical legal reasoning. Nothing could be further from the truth. The most important job done by judges is the making of findings of fact and, where a jury is the tribunal of fact, the provision of guidance to the jury. The primacy of fact finding in the course of the administration of justice is not acknowledged as widely as it ought be.
Your Honour’s performance as a trial judge, or as a judge instructing a jury, was always impeccable. No doubt your Honour can remember occasions on which your have been overturned on appeal but none of your colleagues, to whom I have spoken in recent days, can do so.
Both as a trial judge, and as a judge sitting in the Court of Appeal, your Honour has made important contributions to the development of the civil law. Your work has covered the full range of diverse civil disputes that come before the Common Law Division. A number of your Honour’s judgments are regarded as the leading cases on particular matters.
It is, however, in the area of criminal justice, both at trial and on appeal, that your Honour has made your most important contribution. You have done so across the full spectrum of the issues that arise in this fundamental area of the law: the elements of liability, the details of criminal procedure, the admissibility of evidence and the principles of sentencing. There is no area of the criminal law in which your Honour has not delivered judgments that, I have no doubt, will stand the test of time. Your judgments comprehensively analyse every issue that arose in each case and every one manifests a force and clarity of expression that ensures their utility for the long term.
This contribution began soon after your Honour’s appointment when your Honour presided in the Ananda Marga Inquiry to determining whether the convictions in that high profile matter were safe. Your Honour’s analysis has frequently been cited with approval in subsequent such inquiries. Subsequently your Honour delivered many judgments which serve as models for all those who have followed: directions with respect to relationship evidence in a sexual assault case; principles of relevance when sentencing Aboriginal offenders - principles which manifest your Honour’s profound humanity; the construction and operation of the unfavourable witness provisions under the 1995 Evidence Act; the operation of new provisions concerning admissions under the same Act; determining that the mental health fitness provisions extend to persons who are developmentally or intellectually disabled; determining what to do in the case of jury misbehaviour, such as obtaining information about an accused over the internet or undertaking private views; guidance as to the role of drug addiction as a factor relevant to sentencing for offences such as armed robbery; determining whether a sentence of life imprisonment is appropriate after the “life means life” statutory amendments. Recently your Honour conducted the first trial of an alleged terrorist under the special legislation adopted for the trial of such offenders. Your Honour also participated in all of the sentencing guideline judgments which the Court developed over recent years. Your contribution to the analysis contained in those judgments was fundamental, whether or not your Honour wrote a separate judgment.
No-one in this room, indeed few people in this State, is unaware of the extraordinary public service your Honour performed in conducting the Royal Commission into the NSW Police Service and the accompanying paedophile inquiry. Your Honour’s intelligence, competence and courage were never on better display than during that period. At the outset your Honour had the crucial insight that you would not discover whether or not there existed systematic and entrenched corruption by reviewing files relating to past matters. You recruited police from the Australian Federal Police and from the forces of other States to conduct your own investigations. Turning one crooked policeman at an early stage enabled the covert work of the Commission to produce extraordinary results, including that celebrated and now iconic footage, recorded by a camera in the dashboard of a car, showing that person handing over a bribe to a colleague. From that moment onwards the Commission was seen to be effective and the impetus towards reform within the police force became unstoppable.
Your final report did not simply record the existence of widespread corruption, including process corruption such as verballing and the planting of evidence, but put forward a range of proposals for significant management change, including a new institutional structure to prevent, or at least minimise, the future occurrence of the conduct exposed. The parallel paedophile inquiry led to a range of recommendations, also adopted, with respect to the adequacy of the law and the conduct of court cases involving child complainants. For these reports alone, the people of NSW will stand in your debt for decades to come.
There is another contribution, perhaps not quite as public, but which is also of great significance. I refer to your Honour’s role as a judicial administrator. The period of your service coincided with the transformation of the role of judges with respect to the conduct of proceedings. The judiciary now actively seeks to ensure the effective and efficient management of individual cases and of the case load of courts, a role which it did not perform at all when you became a judge over 20 years ago. Your Honour was a leader in this development.
There may have been in the past judges who acted on the principle that nothing must ever be done for the first time. That has long since ceased to be the case. It was never true of your Honour. There is no aspect of this Court’s management of civil common law cases or criminal trials or criminal appeals that has not been initiated or expanded or reinforced by your own contribution and example. I can testify personally to the fact that until the day that you retired, you never lost your enthusiasm for new ideas and your preparedness to review past practice.
For all of these reasons, and others that time does not permit me to mention, it is with great regret that your colleagues gather here today to say farewell to a remarkable man.
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